Emotional taxes: We need to teach children resilience

I’ve never been particularly great at handling my feelings. At school emotional intelligence was an afterthought, a topic talked about in the yearly assembly that gave me the ick. A subject that lived in the shadow of grades and the status quo.

However, I hadn’t really thought about that crucial gap in our education until I was 20 years old and serving pints behind a bar during my third year of university. I got a phone call to say my dad had passed away from a heart attack.

Beside the pain, the thing I remember the most is how envious I was of my mother. She seemed to have found the way to cope with the loss of a loved one, while I felt like I was failing, overwhelmed by a constant stream of conflicting questions – ‘Should I cry? Should I move on?’

Now three years later, I am left with the lingering feeling of guilt that I never fully grieved him and an emotional knot that I still don’t know how to untangle.

According to the Child Bereavement Network, for around 46,300 children in the UK, this Christmas will be the first they spend without one of their parents. Yet death remains a taboo subject at school, a gap in the curriculum that exposes one of the biggest flaws of contemporary education – the failure to equip children with the tools to navigate complex emotional experiences.

The truth is that the reality children are living right now is vastly different from prior generations – growing up in today’s world is quite emotionally taxing.

Technology has become part of nearly every child’s life. Ofcom data shows a quarter of three and four-year-olds now own a smartphone, while half of children under 13 are on social media. Kids are trapped in echo chambers and are pushed to watch content by ‘influencers’ who define happiness or posts that show depression as fashionable.

And when they take their eyes off the screen, the situation does not get much better. Politicians who continuously fail to meet climate targets, a never-ending financial crisis, an overstretched healthcare system, and a polarised world where leaders are tip-toeing around a global conflict. It is a bleak future.

This is where Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) comes in: a curriculum designed not just to teach students facts, but to help them to self-control and become emotionally resilient.

Research led by Yale University, which analysed more than 420 experimental studies of SEL across 50 countries, showed students who participate in these programmes report less anxiety and suicidal thoughts, and perform better in school academically and socially.

Indeed, emotional intelligence was part of the controversial curriculum of excellence, with aims such as ensuring that children became “aware” of their feelings and able to develop the ability to talk about them. However, much like the rest of the curriculum, it has failed to do what it said, with more than 8,650 children and young people referred to Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services in Scotland for the quarter ending in June 2024.

And, as Brian Dow, deputy chief executive of Rethink Mental Illness, pointed out last month: “A child needing to receive treatment in a mental health hospital is not an unavoidable fact of life – it is the consequence of political decisions which mean we have failed to adequately support that child early enough.”

I still have awful days, where the weight of guilt makes it hard to breathe, and while there are things one can never really learn how to deal with, I often wish I had known how to better cope with them.