It’s a surprising complaint coming from a 42-year-old Yale research scientist with a 27-page CV and nearly $4 million in career funding. But Brackett knows that many kids feel the way he does about school, and he wants to do a complete emotional makeover of the nation’s schools.

At a time of contentious debate over how to reform schools to make teachers more effective and students more successful, “social emotional learning” may be a key part of the solution. An outgrowth of the emotional intelligence framework, popularized by Daniel Goleman, SEL teaches children how to identify and manage emotions and interactions. One of the central considerations of an evolved EQ—as proponents call an “emotional quotient”—is promoting empathy, a critical and often neglected quality in our increasingly interconnected, multicultural world.

Brackett quickly learned that developing empathy in kids requires working on their teachers first. Ten years ago, he and his colleagues introduced a curriculum about emotions in schools, asking teachers to implement it in their own classrooms. When he observed the lessons, he was struck by the discomfort many of the instructors showed in talking about emotion. “There was one teacher who took the list of feelings we had provided and crossed out all of what she perceived of as ‘negative’ emotions before asking the students to identify what they were feeling,” Brackett says. “We realized that if the teachers didn’t get it, the kids never would.”

So in 2005, Brackett and his team at the Health, Emotion, and Behavior Lab at Yale developed a training program—now called RULER—that instructs teachers in the skills, knowledge, and attitudes necessary for emotional health, then helps them shift the focus to children. The program focuses on five key skills: recognizing emotions in oneself and others, understanding the causes and consequences of emotions, labeling the full range of emotions, expressing emotions appropriately in different contexts, and regulating emotions effectively to foster relationships and achieve goals. Classrooms adopt “emotional literacy charters”—agreements that the whole community agrees to concerning interpersonal interactions—and kids use “mood meters” to identify the nature and intensity of their feelings and “blueprints” to chart out past experiences they might learn from.

But the curriculum doesn’t just exist as a separate subject— teachers are trained to integrate lessons in emotion into other subjects. A discussion about the protagonist in a young adult novel, can be an opportunity for students to practice reading emotional cues. History becomes not just a lesson about dates and battles, but a study in the ways in human emotion can be inspired or manipulated by charismatic leaders.

Now in use in hundreds of schools around the country, RULER has been measurably successful. Research indicates that the average student in a RULER-enriched classroom has 11 percent better grades and 17 percent fewer problems in school. Now, Brackett’s group is embarking on a 10-year study of the longer-term effects of the RULER curriculum on 200 students in New York City and New Hampshire high schools.

In one New York City school that serves a high number of special needs students, administrators attribute a 60 percent reduction in behavioral problems to the RULER approach. “One teacher used to go home with welts on her body because these kids were so emotionally challenged that they were kicking and hitting her,” Brackett says. “Since she’s been doing emotional literacy for two years, she’s had no incidents.”

Why the change? “She told me that she developed a lot more empathy for her students when she grew to understand that emotions didn’t only exist when they exploded,” Brackett says, “Kids in these classrooms now have permission to say that they’re shifting in to the red quadrant of the mood meter, rather than exploding.”

The idea of emphasizing emotional learning began in 1994, when Goleman created the Collaborative for Social and Emotional Learning. Now the group serves as a central body for programs like Brackett’s across the country and the world.

CASEL president Roger Weissberg, says that it takes “the three Ps” to make effective social and emotional learning a reality: policy, at both the state and federal level; principals’ buy-in; and professional development. CASEL is teaming up with other leaders in the field to conduct a study of SEL standards in all 50 states.

Despite substantial data indicating that SEL raises test scores, there are naysayers, particularly as school systems struggle with tight budgets. In a recent interview on a local television station in Connecticut, a newscaster said to Brackett: “The kids can’t read, but now they’ll learn how to whine really well.”

He chuckled, but responded in all seriousness: “You have to think about what motivates students to want to learn. If you know how emotions drive attention, learning, memory, and decision making you know that integrating [SEL] is going to enhance those areas.”

Interest in SEL spiked after Rutgers University student Tyler Clementi jumped from the George Washington Bridge in September 2010 after being bullied by his roommate. Clementi’s death was one of at least a half dozen suicides of gay teens around that time, prompting the creation of legislation, the hugely popular “It Gets Better,” campaign, and an uptick in interest and foundation funding to the nation’s various SEL programs.

But real change, Brackett says, will come from embracing SEL as a core part of the curriculum, not by parachuting into assemblies at schools trying to “solve bullying.” “Emotional literacy should be taught from womb to tomb, because the emotional challenges we meet vary as a function of our age,” he says. “You’re not going to teach a kindergartener not to alienate people, but you might point out that little Mario looks lonely. In middle school, it’s appropriate to start talking about alienation.”

Brackett says his own experiences being bored and bullied in school contributed to his interest in emotional learning. “I think back to being 12 years old, sitting in 7th grade, having kids push me, bang my fingers in the lockers, draw on me with a pen, and no one was doing anything about it,” he says. “I didn’t want anyone to stand up for me, I just didn’t want it to happen. We have to make people more empathic.”

Published in partnership with Good.is

Photo via GerryT

But in a competitive world where children have high academic expectations, and where many communities are unable to demarcate space or time exclusively for children’s play, the importance of play seems to have fallen out of focus. The results are significant -- including higher rates of obesity and mental-emotional disorders like hyperactivity.

Darell Hammond founded KaBOOM! nearly sixteen years ago to help create access to playgrounds and other play spaces for children all over the United States. Hammond has recently published KaBOOM: How One May Built a Movement to Save Play to share what he has learned while advocating for play’s critical role in child development. Hammond will be speaking about his book on Wednesday, April 27 at the New York Public Library (if interested please RSVP to April DeSimone, april at e4creaction dot org).

Five takeaways from KaBOOM: How One Man Built a Movement to Save Play:

1. Social change involves personal transformation: Hammond wants readers to know that anyone can make an impact, regardless of where you’re from. He grew up in a group home and didn’t graduate from college. Many people think you need some sort of special pedigree or a fancy degree, but change comes within.
2. How an organization becomes successful: In 15 years, KaBOOM! raised $200 million, mainly from corporations, and leveraged the efforts of a million volunteers. These achievements were not without failure, but Hammond was intent on learning from those failures through maintaining an attitude of humility and vulnerability. Also, KaBOOM was taking an innovative approach to a social problem by creating public-private partnerships, before it was commonplace.
3. Do more and do better: KaBOOM is not just intent on becoming a main playground builder; they are also focused on building better playgrounds, and giving people the tools and community-base to do things on their own. For example, in some cases people have simply organized a front-yard “playborhood.” And sometimes the best playground can be found in a front yard, with a stick, and an empty box.
4. Our culture needs to reevaluate the importance of play: Play is not a luxury, Hammond insists. It’s through play that kids build the social skills, muscular development, and creativity that’s necessary not only for a joyous childhood but also a productive adulthood. And it needs to be child-directed, child-initiated play, unstructured play.
5. Parents' attitudes matter: Hammond laments that, these days, kids don’t roam far, because parents won’t let them out of their sight, and this contributes to indoor screen time (and more video games and TV). What’s required for substantial changes in playtime is a twin engine approach: to have more playful kids, we also need more playful adults, so that they understand what their kids are getting out of it. But adults also need to let kids simply play, even if there are rewards and failures: skinned knees and dirty clothes. A happy child is generally a muddy and messy child.

Photo: Bullit Marquez/Associated Press. A mother in the Philippines used the warmth of her body to nurture her prematurely born daughter.

Sometimes, the best way to progress isn’t to advance — to step up with more money, more technology, more modernity. It’s to retreat.

Towards the end of the 1970s, the Mother and Child Institute in Bogota, Colombia, was in deep trouble. The institute was the city’s obstetrical reference hospital, where most of the city’s poor women went to give birth. Nurses and doctors were in short supply. In the newly created neonatal intensive care unit, there were so few incubators that premature babies had to share them — sometimes three to an incubator. The crowded conditions spread infections, which are particularly dangerous for preemies. The death rate was high.

Dr. Edgar Rey, the chief of the pediatrics department, could have attempted to do what many other hospital officials would have done: wage a political fight for more money, more incubators and more staff.

He would likely have lost. What was happening at the Mother and Child Institute was not unusual. Conditions were much better, in fact, than at most public hospitals in the third world. Hospitals that mainly serve the poor have very little political clout, which means that conditions in their wards sometimes seem to have been staged by Hieronymous Bosch. They have too much disease, too few nurses and sometimes no doctors at all. They can be so crowded that patients sleep on the floor and so broke that people must bring their own surgical gloves and thread. I recently visited a hospital in Ethiopia that didn’t even have water — the nurses washed their hands after they got home at night.

Rey thought about the basics. What is the purpose of an incubator? It is to keep a baby warm, oxygenated and nourished — to simulate as closely as possible the conditions of the womb. There is another mechanism for accomplishing these goals, Rey reasoned, the same one that cared for the baby during its months of gestation. Rey also felt, something that probably all mothers feel intuitively: that one reason babies in incubators did so poorly was that they were separated from their mothers. Was there a way to avoid the incubator by employing the baby’s mother instead?

What he came up with is an idea now known as kangaroo care. Aspects of kangaroo care are now in use even in wealthy countries — most hospitals in the United States, for example, have adopted some kangaroo care practices. But its real impact has been felt in poor countries, where it has saved countless preemies’ lives and helped others to survive with fewer problems.

In Rey’s system, a mother of a preemie puts the baby on her exposed chest, dressed only in a diaper and sometimes a cap, in an upright or semi-upright position. The baby is strapped in by a scarf or other cloth sling supporting its bottom, and all but its head is covered by mom’s shirt. The mother keeps the baby like that, skin-to-skin, as much as possible, even sleeping in a reclining chair. Fathers and other relatives or friends can wear the baby as well to give the mother a break. Even very premature infants can go home with their families (with regular follow-up visits) once they are stable and their mothers are given training.

The babies stay warm, their own temperature regulated by the sympathetic biological responses that occur when mother and infant are in close physical contact. The mother’s breasts, in fact, heat up or cool down depending on what the baby needs. The upright position helps prevent reflux and apnea. Feeling the mother’s breathing and heartbeat helps the babies to stabilize their own heart and respiratory rates. They sleep more. They can breastfeed at will, and the constant contact encourages the mother to produce more milk. Babies breastfeed earlier and gain more weight.

The physical closeness encourages emotional closeness, which leads to lower rates of abandonment of premature infants. This was a serious problem among the patients of Rey’s hospital; without being able to hold and bond with their babies, some mothers had little attachment to counter their feelings of being overwhelmed with the burdens of having a preemie. But kangaroo care also had enormous benefits for parents. Every parent, I think, can understand the importance of holding a baby instead of gazing at him in an incubator. With kangaroo care, parents and baby go through less stress. Nurses who practice kangaroo care also report that mothers also feel more confident and effective because they are the heroes in their babies’ care, instead of passive bystanders watching a mysterious process from a distance.

The hospitals were the third beneficiaries. Kangaroo care freed up incubators. Getting preemies home as soon as they were stable also lessened overcrowding and allowed nurses and doctors to concentrate on the patients who needed them most.

Kangaroo care has been widely studied. A trial in a Bogota hospital of 746 low birth weight babies randomly assigned to either kangaroo or conventional incubator care found that the kangaroo babies had shorter hospital stays, better growth of head circumference and fewer severe infections. They had slightly better rates of survival, but the difference was not statistically significant. Other studies have found fewer differences between kangaroo and conventional methods. A conservative summary of the evidence to date is that kangaroo care is at least as good as conventional treatment — and perhaps better.

In much of the world, however, whether a mother’s chest is better or worse than an incubator is not the point. Hospitals have no incubators, or have only a few. And millions of mothers never see a hospital — they give birth at home. In very poor countries, where pregnant women are unlikely to get the food and care they need, low birth weight babies are very common — nearly one in five babies in Malawi, for example, is too small. Nearly a million low birth weight babies die each year in poor countries. But thanks to kangaroo care, many of them can be saved. The Manama Mission Hospital in southwest Zimbabwe, for example, had available only antibiotics and piped oxygen in its neonatal unit. Survival rates for babies born under 1500 grams (3.3 lbs.) improved from 10 percent to 50 percent when kangaroo care was started in the 1980s. In 2003, the World Health Organization put kangaroo care on its list of endorsed practices.

Dr. Rey took a challenge that most people would assume requires more money, personnel and technology and solved it in a way that requires less of all three. I am not a romantic who wants to abandon modern medical care in favor of traditional solutions. People with AIDS in South Africa need antiretroviral therapy, not traditional healers’ home brews. If you are bitten by a cobra in India, you should not go to the temple. You should go to the hospital for antivenin. Modern medical care is essential and technology very often saves lives.

Kangaroo care, however, is modern medical care, by which I mean that its effectiveness is proven in randomized controlled trials — the strongest kind of evidence. And because it is powered by the human body alone, it is theoretically available to hundreds of millions of mothers who would otherwise have no hope of saving their babies.

But theoretical availability is only helpful for theoretical babies. Another of kangaroo care’s important innovations is that its inventors realized that ideas don’t travel by themselves. They established a way to get the practice from Bogota into hospitals and clinics all over the world — something that takes a lot more creativity and work than it sounds. On Saturday I’ll respond to comments and talk about how kangaroo care has been able to reach the places that need it most.

This column was originally published in The New York Times. Fixes appears every Tuesday in the Times Opinionator section.

Photo credit/caption: Agence France-Presse; A mother and child in Colombia, where the “kangaroo care” method was first used in the late 1970s.

Dulas is a computer-generated character created by Julia Borbolla, a Mexican child psychologist. It is one of several “emotional agents” Borbolla has invented that are being recognized in Mexico City as capable of gaining rare access into the inner lives of children. Dulas, like all of these characters, comes from a planet called Antenopolis and knows nothing about life on earth, not even what a mother or father is. He looks like a pointy-headed M&M with big eyes and radio antennas. He is red, the color children associate with burns, and wears bunny rabbit slippers because he remains in a hospital – so children can count on his companionship.

A therapist named Rafael Mateos Ortiz took the boy to Dulas’s room, which was decorated with stars, planets and children’s art. In the corner a TV screen was set inside a cutout of a 1950s-style spaceship, with mailbox slots for children to place notes or drawings. Mateos explained to the boy that Dulas doesn’t like to interact with adults – so he would only come out after he left the room. Mateos went to an adjacent room and Dulas appeared on the screen. Speaking through Dulas in a software-altered cartoony voice, Mateos used keyboard strokes to make him move and express emotions.

When I visited Mateos recently at the Tacubaya hospital, he told me that, within 30 minutes: “[The boy] told Dulas that he was living in a shelter, that his parents had died, that he had been abused, that he had been burned by his uncle and aunt.” Mateos added: “It was a major step – beginning to talk about his feelings.” Now the therapists had insights they could work with and the boy said he wanted to speak with Dulas again.

Over the past five years, Borbolla’s characters have been used to assist 2,000 children from 3 to 14 years old, and have been employed in three Mexico City hospitals and a center for disabilities in another city, Morelia. The characters collectively go by the name Antenas because they all have antennas and come from Antenopolis (Borbolla’s original character also goes by the name Antenas.). The psychologists I spoke with said the tool creates an environment of trust and empathy that enables them to understand children’s issues more quickly than they imagined possible, and enhances the effectiveness of their work by providing a context in which children find it easier to discover and express their feelings — which carries over to therapy. “In my practice, if I needed four or five visits with a child to understand what really happened — with Antenas I need 10 or 15 minutes, maybe two sessions,” said Borbolla.

Therapists have been using puppets to help children unearth and process their feelings for decades. But Borbolla, who has been working with children for 30 years, has taken this kind of work a step further, assembling elements that haven’t been put together before. To begin with, the children interact with the characters (or cyber-puppets) in a room without adults present (therapists monitor with cameras). The characters also have attributes and stories that are both designed to build rapport and make it easy for children to project their feelings upon them. Because they come from a planet that is different from Earth (but may have similar aspects), they are able to credibly ask naïve questions, like “What is a family?” or “What is a school?” that can elicit revealing answers. Like many children, they prefer not to interact with adults. “Children are drawn to that kind of complicity,” comments Borbolla.

Perhaps most important, therapists must undergo several months of training and practice, under observation, before they can use the tool. Not all therapists receive certification, Borbolla says. It takes a good ear and a light touch ─ playful, enthusiastic, funny at times, but not too funny ─ to understand how to follow the child’s lead and make the characters come alive in a way that respects the child’s feelings and is believable enough to work.

Borbolla originally got the idea to use a drawing of an animated character to communicate with children when she was working as a school psychologist in the 1980s. Years later, in private practice, she worked with a cyber-puppet maker to develop a software version. She spent six years refining the tool. “This is the fruit of many years’ experience and many adjustments,” she told me.

In 2005, she established a nonprofit foundation, Antenas Por Los Ninos, supported by grants, to disseminate the work. The impetus was a comment made by her daughter Juli, who is now 27 and is also a clinical psychologist. Juli had been born without a right ventricle in her heart, and as an infant and child she had undergone repeated surgeries and hospitalizations. Borbolla recalled: “She told me, ‘If I had had Antenas in the hospital, I would have asked the character many things I never asked because I was afraid of saying things that might hurt you or my father. I wanted to know if I was going to die. I wanted to know what else was going to happen to me.’ ”

Antenas characters have been used to assist children who are experiencing a range of difficulties. Therapists in Tacubaya use them in pre- and post-operative therapy and burn rehabilitation. In Morelia, one character, Bompi, is employed to assist children with disabilities. (Bompi says that all humans have disabilities because they don’t have antennas.) The program is being used to provide emotional support to children with heart disease and cancer, teach children how to protect themselves from potential abuse, and, at the government’s request, learn about children’s experiences in public day care centers. In a pilot project being conducted by the Pediatric Hospital of Iztapalapa in conjunction with four government agencies, children’s interactions with another character are carefully being reviewed as potential legal evidence in cases of violence or abuse.

One of the first times Borbolla used the Antenas character was with a five-year-old girl whose parents brought her in because she had been wetting her bed. Antenas asked the girl, “Who do you live with?” She replied: “My father, my mother, my little brother, and the maid.” When Antenas asked: “What’s a maid?” the girl replied “It’s a woman who helps mother with the house and when your father goes out, she hurts you.” Another time Antenas asked a young boy, “What’s a driver?” and the boy said that a driver is a man who uses the car and touches you in the guest bathroom when your parents go out. Borbolla explained that these disclosures ─ spontaneous responses to general questions ─ are highly reliable, especially when they come from young children. But therapists also follow up with the child and the family to confirm facts.

In such cases, therapists have to handle the information carefully. One principle of the work is that a therapist must not reveal that she knows something that was said to an Antenas character privately. The character must first ask permission of children to share any information with a “good adult.” This preserves the trust and integrity of the child’s relationship with the character. In the case of the boy and the driver above, Antenas said he should tell what he said to “Julia, that lady who brought you here.” The boy replied, “If I tell someone the driver will kill my mother.” Antenas said, “She will know how to protect you and your mother.” The boy gave permission for Antenas to tell Julia and she made sure the child’s parents, who happened to be wealthy, came directly to her office to pick up the boy (the driver was waiting for him outside) to deal with the matter.

Over the years, Borbolla has gained insights into children simply by having a character  ask basic questions like “What is a mother?” or “What is a father?” With children in hospitals, the character may ask: ‘What is a doctor?’ If the child responds ─ as many do, in effect ─ “A mean person who makes you suffer,” then Antenas can help the child handle his fears and adapt to his treatment.

The psychologists I spoke and emailed with said they loved the tool. Ana Zarina Fiorentini Cañedo, who supervises the psychological program at Tacubaya, wrote that she highly recommends the program for hospitals because of its efficacy in helping children heal from the emotional pain of illness. Some psychologists have concerns about children being deceived into thinking they are confiding with a character when they are in fact talking to human adults. Borbolla acknowledges it, but says that it’s an extension of the established practice of using puppets. And she is careful to add that Antenas is no substitute for therapy. (She likes to limit its use to six sessions.) “It is a simple tool, but it can be enriched with the personality of each expert,” she says.

To date, Antenas hasn’t been rigorously studied, and Borbolla is working to engage researchers to examine its impact. She is developing an Internet-based application to reach children who are immobile. And she dreams of having the resources to bring the tool into disaster areas, like Haiti. “After an earthquake, everybody thinks of food and blankets, but what are the children feeling? How are they faring?” Her biggest fear is that the tool will be co-opted for negative purposes. “I see how powerful it is,” she told me. “It can be used to get into the souls of children.”

This column was originally published in The New York Times. Fixes appears every Tuesday in the Times Opinionator section.

Photo credit/caption: Photo 1: Antenas por los Ninos, Talking about abuse to Dulas, instead of an adult, has been therapeutic for some traumatized children; Photo 2: Antenas por los Ninos, The original Antenas; Photo 3: Antenas por los Ninos, Bompi.

Lately, the issue of bullying has been in the news, sparked by the suicide of Tyler Clementi, a gay college student who was a victim of cyber-bullying, and by a widely circulated New York Times article that focused on “mean girl” bullying in kindergarten. The federal government has identified bullying as a national problem. In August, it organized the first-ever “Bullying Prevention Summit,” and it is now rolling out an anti-bullying campaign aimed at 5- to 8-year old children. This past month the Department of Education released a guidance letter to schools, colleges and universities to take bullying seriously, or face potential legal consequences.

Stop Bulling Now Campaign The problem of bullying has attracted federal attention. Above, an excerpt from a cartoon in the government’s bullying prevention guide for children. To see the entire cartoon, click here. (pdf)

The typical institutional response to bullying is to get tough. In the Tyler Clementi case, prosecutors are considering bringing hate-crime charges. But programs like the one I want to discuss today show the potential of augmenting our innate impulses to care for one another instead of just falling back on punishment as a deterrent. And what’s the secret formula? A baby.

We know that humans are hardwired to be aggressive and selfish. But a growing body of research is demonstrating that there is also a biological basis for human compassion. Brain scans reveal that when we contemplate violence done to others we activate the same regions in our brains that fire up when mothers gaze at their children, suggesting that caring for strangers may be instinctual. When we help others, areas of the brain associated with pleasure also light up. Research by Felix Warneken and Michael Tomasello indicates that toddlers as young as 18 months behave altruistically. (If you want to feel good, watch one of their 15-second video clips here.)

More important, we are beginning to understand how to nurture this biological potential. It seems that it’s not only possible to make people kinder, it’s possible to do it systematically at scale – at least with school children. That’s what one organization based in Toronto called Roots of Empathy has done.

Roots of Empathy was founded in 1996 by Mary Gordon, an educator who had built Canada’s largest network of school-based parenting and family-literacy centers after having worked with neglectful and abusive parents. Gordon had found many of them to be lacking in empathy for their children. They hadn’t developed the skill because they hadn’t experienced or witnessed it sufficiently themselves. She envisioned Roots as a seriously proactive parent education program – one that would begin when the mothers- and fathers-to-be were in kindergarten.

Since then, Roots has worked with more than 12,600 classes across Canada, and in recent years, the program has expanded to the Isle of Man, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and the United States, where it currently operates in Seattle. Researchers have found that the program increases kindness and acceptance of others and decreases negative aggression.

Here’s how it works: Roots arranges monthly class visits by a mother and her baby (who must be between two and four months old at the beginning of the school year). Each month, for nine months, a trained instructor guides a classroom using a standard curriculum that involves three 40-minute visits – a pre-visit, a baby visit, and a post-visit. The program runs from kindergarten to seventh grade. During the baby visits, the children sit around the baby and mother (sometimes it’s a father) on a green blanket (which represents new life and nature) and they try to understand the baby’s feelings. The instructor helps by labeling them. “It’s a launch pad for them to understand their own feelings and the feelings of others,” explains Gordon. “It carries over to the rest of class.”

I have visited several public schools in low-income neighborhoods in Toronto to observe Roots of Empathy’s work. What I find most fascinating is how the baby actually changes the children’s behavior. Teachers have confirmed my impressions: tough kids smile, disruptive kids focus, shy kids open up. In a seventh grade class, I found 12-year-olds unabashedly singing nursery rhymes.

The baby seems to act like a heart-softening magnet. No one fully understands why. Kimberly Schonert-Reichl, an applied developmental psychologist who is a professor at the University of British Columbia, has evaluated Roots of Empathy in four studies. “Do kids become more empathic and understanding? Do they become less aggressive and kinder to each other? The answer is yes and yes,” she explained. “The question is why.”

C. Sue Carter, a neurobiologist based at the University of Illinois at Chicago, who has conducted pioneering research into the effects of oxytocin, a hormone that has been linked with caring and trusting behavior, suspects that biology is playing a role in the program’s impact. “This may be an oxytocin story,” Carter told me. “I believe that being around the baby is somehow putting the children in a biologically different place. We don’t know what that place is because we haven’t measured it. However, if it works here as it does in other animals, we would guess that exposure to an infant would create a physiological state in which the children would be more social.”

To parent well, you must try to imagine what your baby is experiencing. So the kids do a lot of “perspective taking.” When the baby is too small to raise its own head, for example, the instructor asks the children to lay their heads on the blanket and look around from there. Perspective taking is the cognitive dimension of empathy – and like any skill it takes practice to master. (Cable news hosts, take note.)

Children learn strategies for comforting a crying baby. They learn that one must never shake a baby. They discover that everyone comes into the world with a different temperament, including themselves and their classmates. They see how hard it can be to be a parent, which helps them empathize with their own mothers and fathers. And they marvel at how capacity develops. Each month, the baby does something that it couldn’t do during its last visit: roll over, crawl, sit up, maybe even begin walking. Witnessing the baby’s triumphs – even something as small as picking up a rattle for the first time — the children will often cheer.

Ervin Staub, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Massachusetts, has studied altruism in children and found that the best way to create a caring climate is to engage children collectively in an activity that benefits another human being. In Roots, children are enlisted in each class to do something to care for the baby, whether it is to sing a song, speak in a gentle voice, or make a “wishing tree.”

The results can be dramatic. In a study of first- to third-grade classrooms, Schonert-Reichl focused on the subset of kids who exhibited “proactive aggression” – the deliberate and cold-blooded aggression of bullies who prey on vulnerable kids. Of those who participated in the Roots program, 88 percent decreased this form of behavior over the school year, while in the control group, only 9 percent did, and many actually increased it. Schonert-Reichl has reproduced these findings with fourth to seventh grade children in a randomized controlled trial. She also found that Roots produced significant drops in “relational aggression” – things like gossiping, excluding others, and backstabbing. Research also found a sharp increase in children’s parenting knowledge.

“Empathy can’t be taught, but it can be caught,” Gordon often says – and not just by children. “Programmatically my biggest surprise was that not only did empathy increase in children, but it increased in their teachers,” she added. “And that, to me, was glorious, because teachers hold such sway over children.”

When the program was implemented on a large scale across the province of Manitoba – it’s now in 300 classrooms there — it achieved an “effect size” that Rob Santos, the scientific director of Healthy Child Manitoba, said translates to reducing the proportion of students who get into fights from 15 percent to 8 percent, close to a 50 percent reduction. “For a program that costs only hundreds of dollars per child, the cost-benefit of preventing later problems that cost thousands of dollars per child, is obvious,” said Santos.

Follow up studies have found that outcomes are maintained or enhanced three years after the program ends. “When you’ve got emotion and cognition happening at the same time, that’s deep learning,” explains Gordon. “That’s learning that will last.”

It’s hard to envision what a kinder and gentler world, or school, would truly look like. But Gordon told me a story about a seventh grade student in a tough school in Toronto that offered a glimpse. He was an effeminate boy from an immigrant background who was always the butt of jokes. “Anytime he spoke, you’d hear snickers in the background,” she recalled. Towards the end of the year, the children in Roots are asked to write a poem or a song for the baby. Kids often work in groups and come up with raps. This boy decided to sing a song he’d written himself about mothers.

“He was overweight and nerdy looking. His social skills were not very good,” Gordon recalled. “And he sang his song. The risk he took. My breath was in my fist, hoping that no one would humiliate him. And no one did. Not one youngster smirked. When he finished, they clapped. And I’m sure they all knew that they were holding back. But, oh my God, I was blown away. I couldn’t say anything.”

She added: “When they talk about protecting kids in schools, they talk about gun shields, cameras, lights, but never about the internal environment. But safe is not about the rules – it’s about how the youngsters feel inside.”

Have you seen or do you have ideas about effective ways to diminish bullying in school and elsewhere? We’ll discuss them in Saturday’s follow up – and also look at a critical step that teachers can take to make their classrooms more peaceful.

This column was originally published in The New York Times. Fixes appears every Tuesday in the Times Opinionator section.

Photo caption/credit: The problem of bullying has attracted federal attention. Above, an excerpt from a cartoon in the government’s bullying prevention guide for children. To see the entire cartoon, click here. Credit: Stop Bullying Now Campaign

Five-year-olds from low-income communities have one-quarter the vocabulary of their more affluent peers, and half of them enter first grade as much as two years behind in preschool skills. That’s a severe handicap, which will persist for life unless something powerful intervenes. That's why Jumpstart, a Boston-based tutoring and mentoring organization, fosters ongoing relationships between preschoolers and caring adult volunteers. Founded in 1993 with 15 college students working with 15 preschoolers, Jumpstart has grown into a national platform that engages 3,500 college students and retired citizens who assist more than 13,000 children in 20 states.

Here, Jumpstart's President James Cleveland talks about how his organization works to create a “multiplier effect” by influencing not just individual kids’ lives, but whole communities.

Dowser: Jumpstart is a fast growing organization. You’ve nearly tripled the number of students served each year since 2002. But there are so many children who could benefit from this work—is it possible to reach all of them?
Cleveland: I don’t believe we’ll be able to get to every single child in America who needs something like Jumpstart, though the aspiration is important. As a preschool agency serving children in poverty, we are targeting approximately a million kids. But in Roxbury, Boston, for example, thanks to our program there’s a whole community of children with stronger skills than they had two years ago – and that’s getting the attention of the public school system, business leaders, and foundations. Over time, we can have influence in other ways, like being invited to a conversation on a policy level that could affect the entire city. Four hundred kids could affect 4,000 kids.

How is Jumpstart unique in helping the existing education system?
In a kindergarten class, about one-third of the students entering won’t be ready for school. The teacher may not be able to give the attention that kids require, and suddenly those kids are falling even further behind.

During the years before kindergarten, a child’s brain is most open to learning language and literacy skills through one-on-one interactions with an adult.  We aim to take advantage of this unique time in children’s development by providing caring, trained adults to provide that attention, so that chances are higher they will be successful for the rest of their academic career.

Can you give me some examples of how your Corps volunteer members’ understanding of child psychology comes into play during their mentorships?
At three years old a child’s brain has double the active neural connections of an adult’s brain, so it’s very elastic. It’s constantly making, destroying and remaking connections, and this brain activity has a lot to do with the child’s experiences.

We teach our volunteers the child development stages. This framework helps them understand why we’re using a particular curriculum or set of activities at each stage.

How do Corps members treat a child differently than would a preschool teacher who hasn’t been through the Jumpstart training?
Our Corps members understand that many of these children are still in this ‘me, me, me’ phase.  When a child has a conflict with another child, rather than using punitive approaches, a Jumpstart Corps member will remove the object in question, and then speak with both children to understand why they feel the way they do. They encourage the children to come to an agreement and solve the problem themselves.

What has been an unexpected success at Jumpstart?
About six years ago, we decided to engage several retired citizens to become Corps members. They have knowledge that college students don’t: they’ve raised their own kids; they’re raising grandkids.  It takes a few weeks for a college student to develop a relationship with the child—they don’t always look like the children that they’re serving, they don’t have the experience, and initially there’s a confidence issue.  I’ve walked into a class on the second day and the children have already developed emotional connections with these older folks, which is really startling to me.

How about a success story?
There was a little boy named Anthony who was not talking and lashed out whenever he was exposed to books.  Through Jumpstart, a college student named Ashley became his partner. Anthony started talking and enjoyed reading. Two years later, he realized that he had grown to love books and that he was doing better than most of his classmates because of Ashley, and wanted to thank her. He called her and said, ‘I’m going to write a book about you and me and this is going to be my way to thank you.’

I read that you helped open four new SCORE! centers and cofounded Inside Track, a support and guidance organization for college students, before joining Jumpstart. What made you want to join Jumpstart?
When I first came to Boston to learn more about Jumpstart I observed a class in the South End. They were doing circle time. A little boy walked up to me and said, ‘Are you with Jumpstart?’ I said I was, and he hugged my leg, grabbed my hand, and pulled me into the circle. I realized how starved these kids are for that one-on-one attention and how safe they feel because of Jumpstart.

This interview was edited and condensed.

Photo: Julie Furbush for Dowser

Click here to view the embedded video.

In one of the center’s programs, college students tutor Chinese adults in English. Another one pairs experienced adults over 55 with parents of young children in order to develop diet-and-exercise plans to prevent childhood obesity.

Inspired by her grandfather and by Gray Panthers founder Maggie Kuhn, Henkin’s work at the Intergenerational Center continues to evolve. What started as a Philadelphia-based local service provider in the late 1970s is now shifting toward a national, web-based training center that helps organizations develop effective strategies for lifelong civic engagement and cross-generational contact.

One thing we know from the field of neuroscience is that, unlike computers, the brain is very slow at individual processing. In one second, a computer circuit can handle millions of instructions, but a neuron can fire only about two hundred times. That's why computers are so much faster than human beings at serial, computational tasks.

But why can a child understand someone speaking with a lisp, or a foreign accent, better than the best voice recognition software? Why can a baby recognize facial expressions better than a supercomputer?

The answer is that the brain is a massive parallel processor, with 100 billion neurons operating simultaneously, making it extraordinarily powerful at pattern recognition. Much of what our brains do is to pre-process information—we store up experience—and then, in real time, determine which patterns to apply to which circumstances.

That's why business and law schools teach via case studies. It's why entrepreneurs are so fond of biographies. It's why religions teach morality through allegories. In each case, we load up our brains with examples that enhance our ability to spot patterns. Those patterns can later be summoned to help us manage unforeseeable situations.

What are the implications? To boost your pattern-recognition abilities, give yourself exposures to a variety of experience bases. Don't limit yourself to one model of reality. Different fields -- the law, physics or religion, for example -- offer complimentary ways of understanding the world. Steve Jobs traced his invention of the Mac to a calligraphy course that gave him an aesthetic appreciation which he later fused with his technical know-how. Today, we see advances coming at the intersection of fields like biology and computer science, economics and psychology, finance and social entrepreneurship. If you want to be an effective problem-solver, gather experiences from different fields, sectors and cultures—and keep thinking about the patterns.

Back to Part 2

Photo: Mrs McArthur's Blog

I've spent the past 20 years interviewing social entrepreneurs in different countries and fields—and if there's one quality they all have in common, it's creativity. Not a specific talent like a flair for painting or writing poetry, but a generalizable kind of creativity that can be applied to many types of problems.

This creativity has less to do with knowledge (although it requires knowledge) than with a willingness to ask unconventional questions, absorb new information, and try ideas out. It's both playful and bold.

A society that does not nurture this kind of creativity is in trouble.

The irony is that it is so easy to encourage. If you look at young children, they are continually experimenting. Most of their experiments are failures—in the sense that their efforts to control their environment usually backfire. A toddler quickly discovers that he can't stand on a ball. Or he pulls a glass of milk off the table and SMASH! Big mess. But the wonderful thing is that there are no penalties for those failures.

There’s a robust and incredibly accelerated learning process in the first five years of life. And it can be a joy to witness. A first grader (who hasn't been suckered to think that he's really supposed to build the Star Wars ship featured on the Lego box) will concoct the most marvelous paracosm out of a bunch of Lego pieces, Pokemon cards, and plastic reptiles.

Then you get to school and you discover that if you put up your hand and give a wrong answer, it doesn’t feel good. Maybe the other kids laugh at you or the teacher frowns. The impulse to experiment gets abruptly curtailed. How many students come to avoid failure more than they embrace learning? It depends on how much we value 'right' answers over self-directed learning. In this regard, testing can be a huge impediment.

Schools can do much better to nurture the kind of creativity that helps children grow into powerful changemakers. In our new book, Social Entrepreneurship: What Everyone Needs to Know, Susan Davis and I devote a chapter to this subject. Here's a brief excerpt:

In their book The Scientist in the Crib, authors Alison Gopnik, Andrew N. Meltzoff and Patricia K. Kuhl observe that babies and toddlers from their earliest years “think, draw conclusions, make predictions, look for explanations, and even do experiments.” Children know far more about the world than adults imagine, and they seek to understand everything they touch and taste. During their first two years, they make extraordinary intellectual leaps.

For most children, intellectual development slows dramatically within a few years. By the time they are in grade school, children have lost much of the curiosity and resourcefulness that a few years earlier made them incomparable explorers. As the educator Eleanor Duckworth explains in her book The Having of Wonderful Ideas, once children enroll in school, their natural enthusiasm and inquisitiveness becomes subordinated to the needs of adults enlisted to teach them. A young child who breaks something to see what it looks like inside, or asks a question that is socially embarrassing, or wants to discover how it feels to wear shoes on the wrong feet, will often be met with a discouraging glance or tone from an adult.

Duckworth argues that educators should encourage and structure moments when children can have their own ideas and feel good for having them. Only if children honestly believe their ideas are valuable will they develop the interest, ability, and self-confidence to be lifelong learners and doers. “Having confidence in one’s ideas does not mean ‘I know my ideas are right,’" notes Duckworth. "[I]t means ‘I am willing to try out my ideas.’”

Photo: ScienceWorldCA

If you're interested in children, education, social innovation, or, for that matter, the future of America, Newsweek's recent cover story on the "creativity crisis" by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman is a must read. It makes a powerful argument that our system of education, and perhaps our way of life, are diminishing children's imaginative capacities.

Since 1990, measures of creativity among children from kindergarten through sixth grade have steadily declined—and the decrease is significant. This doesn't just mean we'll be producing fewer painters and pianists; it means we'll be producing fewer problem solvers and changemakers of all kinds. Creativity is defined as the ability to produce something "original and useful." And one way it's measured is by asking children questions about specific problems—how to improve a toy truck, for example—and seeing how many unique ideas they come up with and how they combine them. Children who come up with a lot of ideas are more likely to become entrepreneurs, inventors, authors, software developers, and so forth.

In fact, Bronson and Merryman write that the "correlation to lifetime creative accomplishment" has been found to be "more than three times stronger for childhood creativity than childhood IQ." [My emphasis]

Have American educators overlooked creativity? We now evaluate student success almost exclusively by performance on standardized tests that focus primarily on reading and math. In this context, the challenge of nurturing students' imaginations is a luxury many teachers and principals feel they can't afford. But educators in other countries see it differently.

In 2008 British secondary-school curricula—from science to foreign language—was revamped to emphasize idea generation, and pilot programs have begun using Torrance’s test [a leading creativity index] to assess their progress. The European Union designated 2009 as the European Year of Creativity and Innovation, holding conferences on the neuroscience of creativity, financing teacher training, and instituting problem-based learning programs—curricula driven by real-world inquiry—for both children and adults. In China there has been widespread education reform to extinguish the drill-and-kill teaching style. Instead, Chinese schools are also adopting a problem-based learning approach.

What should we be doing? Essentially, we've got to reconstitute childhood. We've got to stop terrifying educators into teaching to the test. Instead, we've got to make sure they give children ample opportunities to engage in imaginative play and practice solving problems that are meaningful. There are effective ways this can be handled in a classroom, as the Newsweek article shows. (And guess what? Test scores soar.)

Parents can also do this at home by giving their children real-world challenges to work through. Quite a number of initiatives like Youth Venture, Do Something and the Girl Scout's Challenge and Change program specialize in helping young people generate and build their own solutions to social problems. Groups like Playworks, Peace First and Roots of Empathy bring child-led problem solving and conflict resolution into elementary school classrooms. These kinds of educational offerings are still seen as supplemental in many districts. But, in fact, they teach children the core skills they need—empathy, leadership, teamwork and the ability to shift perspective—to be creative agents in a world of change.

Tomorrow: More on what schools and parents can do to nurture changemakers.

Continue to Part 2

Photo: Nederlands Watermuseum