Thank you to everyone who has sent in videos or offered a few sentences on your social and emotional learning superpowers — parents, educators, kids and teens! Social and emotional learning is very simply learning about the most important skills in our lives that help us come to deeply know ourselves and others. These skills are best developed in our lives in safe, caring contexts at school, in our homes and in our communities. These are skills like self awareness of strengths, limitations, of our feelings, and our identity; self management, or controlling impulses to persist toward larger goals; social awareness, or empathy, perspective-taking, understanding and interpreting social cues, and showing compassion; and relationship skills like listening, assertively communicating, boundary-setting, and conflict management; and responsible decision-making, or thinking ahead to the consequences of our choices and trying to do no harm to ourselves or others. These fundamental skills are ones we work on developing over a whole lifetime.

Why is SEL Important in Schools?

Because children, teens and the adult who teach them do not leave their hearts and spirits at home when they come to school, it’s critical that we educate those parts of our children alongside reading, writing and ‘rithmatic. Now decades of research solidly backs the fact that children and teens who attend schools with SEL (no matter their SES!) do better academically. On high stakes achievement tests, students were found to out perform their peers without SEL by a 13% advantage (Taylor et al, 2017). We also know that emotions seal in memory. For students, a caring relationship with a teacher is an essential precondition for real learning to take place.

Why is SEL Important in Parenting?

After ten years of asking parents what their hopes and dreams for their children is, I hear the same responses. We want our kids to be happy, responsible, kind, loving, confident. And in order to meet those hopes and dreams, we can build toward them directly by seizing every simple interaction – our conversations, our routines, even our thorniest challenges – to build a social and emotional skill in our child or teen and in ourselves if we only just become intentional about it.

Today and tomorrow, we’ll be sharing our SEL Superpowers and we hope you will too! This is the time to stand up for our well-being – for the needs this generation. So although the campaign is fun and entertaining – and yes, hopefully, you’ll catch an influential ’80s hip hop artist advocating right along with us! -, it also serves a critical rallying call for us all to not be silent, but to make our voices heard now. Our children’s well-being is truly at stake. Join us!

Participate Friday – SEL Day – in the Virtual Summit

Actress and Founder of MindUp Goldie Hawn kicks off the amazing line-up of speakers all day long on Friday, March 10th. Sign up free to attend! You can catch whatever interests you! And be sure not to miss Jennifer Miller, Pamela McVeagh-Lally, Dia Mixon, Lorilei Swanson and Wendy Methvin in their panel on parenting and SEL!

Place your #SELSuperpower in the Comments below and we’ll share on social media!

Much more to come here and watch on social media for the explosion of posts on social and emotional learning! Follow along at #SELday2023!