social-emotional learning (sel)
I’ve been thinking about legislation that targets ‘social-emotional learning’ (SEL) being pushed in the US.
About how being a PhD student away from the societal activation of American culture and news allows me to manage my own nervous system well enough to be able to write an eighty thousand word thesis about children’s mental health and wellbeing through collective trauma at a time where these laws are being put into place. About how, as I think back to my experience working with children in American public schools, I experienced such relief when teachers and school staff are a part of my clients care. About how I could focus my attention on families, who at times can have painful views about children “pushing their buttons on purpose” or “are manipulative” when I didn’t have to teach education professionals about the benefits of naming emotions or not punishing.
It meant there could be an actual wrap around type care where professionals could be aligned when interacting with the children they are connected by. I don’t know if states like Florida will begin firing teachers who don’t follow fascist laws so I don’t know what returning to the US to be a therapist at a school might look like in the future, post PhD.
Will there even be school based mental health care in the future if schools have to remove everything related to ‘trauma-informed’ ‘whole child’ materials?
When professionals and researchers are disregarded, when the findings of studies and training experiences and years in the field are ignored, what does that mean for children and young people?
When the average American adult can only identify three emotions (happy, mad, sad) in themselves consistently, who are the trusted adults that will be modeling and supporting children through disappointment and grief and nervousness when there is no curriculum and time set aside to expand children’s emotional language and awareness?
Especially in a time of living through a global pandemic, with natural disasters increasing, calculated legal harm to trans and queer youth, and international protests for wages that can sustain folks heating their home and buying food for their families.
Children need SEL.