When educators gather this week in New Orleans for a national conference on teaching young children, Mother Goose rhymes will make room for lessons in anger management: aggression prevention, self-regulation and emotion control.
The themes may seem more suited for adults in midlife crisis than 3-year-olds resisting bedtime, but these are the buzzwords of an evolving movement to develop and offer formal lessons in the ABCs of feelings to children under 5.The seminar schedule of the National Association for the Education of Young Children is filled with panel discussions on strategies for coaching preschoolers about their emotions -- a reflection, in part, of fears raised by widely publicized school shootings involving disaffected students.
Anger management programs for elementary school students have been around since the 1980s, but now teaching programs and lesson plans in "impulse control" are being offered to children so young they can't even lisp the words temper tantrum.
Thus far, there is little data on the effectiveness of such coaching. Nevertheless, a debate is evolving about whether formal lessons should be delivered to all preschoolers or limited to children with problems controlling anger.
Even without conclusive evidence, some educators are willing to make a leap of logic: Why not offer lessons early, since children experience the most rapid physical and mental growth between 3 and 6 years old? They also cite studies showing links between problem behavior in preschoolers and difficulties that continue through adolescence.
The programs, which rely on familiar nursery school tools like puppets, games, books and flash cards, seek to provoke conversations about emotions. For example, some preschool teachers encourage children to express their feelings by drawing journals. Others organize childhood games with a twist (Simon says: I'm mad. Simon says: I'm happy.) One teacher asks children to dictate letters to their parents so she can tap their emotions.
Preschool teachers say that over the last 10 years they have noticed a shifting view of the need to address emotional skills, partly because many children come from families with more harried lives.
Carroll Izard, a psychology professor the University of Delaware, and other researchers have measured children's ability to recognize emotional expressions in other people. Based on that emotional skill, Izard said, they could actually predict negative and positive behaviors as the children reached the third grade.
"A child that has more trouble recognizing cues is more likely to get into trouble," he said. "If you measure emotion knowledge and look at the social behavior later, we can predict social withdrawal and depression. A child who has trouble recognizing emotions is more likely to find themselves rejected or on the fringes.