Jenna Bilmes, author of Beyond Behavior Management, explores the need for a renewed emphasis on social and emotional development in young children.

Early childhood education has evolved so much in the past decade, hasn’t it? All we had to worry about in kindergarten and preschool were snack times and fingerplays. The focus of our programs was to help children develop the social and emotional skills that they would need to be successful in primary school where they would begin to learn "reading, 'riting, and 'rithmetic."

Now, with the new push for early language and literacy and academic standards that are trickling down to the toddler years, teachers are feeling pressure to skip over the social and emotional foundations and jump right into phonological awareness and A-B-A-B patterns. "No time for social skills. We have standards to meet." But can we really help children to meet academic standards without giving them a strong foundation in social and emotional skills?

I think of learning much the same way I think of baking a cake. It seems simple enough. Just open the cookbook, gather the ingredients and the tools, and follow the directions. This is pretty much what we do as teachers. We bring all kinds of ingredients and tools into the classroom to help children explore and learn about their worlds. We also fill the role of "cookbook" by giving children guidance on how to use those tools to enhance their learning. For example, we might set up a magnet exploration table and guide children by saying, "Let’s see if you can discover what kinds of things magnets will pick up and what kinds of things won’t stick to the magnet."

However, just as in cooking, children need to bring parts of themselves and their skills to the experience in order for them to be successful. A cookbook might tell you to begin the cake by creaming the butter and the sugar. If you don’t already come to the task with the knowledge that cream means to beat the butter and sugar, you might try to add cream to the mixture and fail at your task. In the same way, when children don’t bring the necessary knowledge and skills to our learning opportunities at school, they, too, will be unable to succeed.

For a moment, think of the skills children need to bring with them in order to be effective learners. You probably thought of such things as their ability to follow directions and work well with others. They have to know how to stay on task even when learning becomes challenging. They need to know how to finish their work. And they need to want to learn and explore.

All of the attitudes and skills that children need to be good students are the very same skills and beliefs that make up a child’s social and emotional self. As children develop attachment and affiliation, they learn the skills they need to work well with adults and other children. When children learn self-regulation, they can stick with a learning activity even if it becomes frustrating or they make mistakes. The development of initiative is important to keep the spark of learning alive and to give children the belief that they will be able to learn and master new things. Problem-solving skills give them the basic tools they need to learn how to decode words, figure out sorting problems, and discover what plants need to thrive.

These social and emotional skills are as necessary to the learning task as the lessons themselves. They set up the child to know how to learn, just like cooking lessons set up one to know how to cook. Once the child knows how to work alongside others, persists through challenging tasks, has confidence that he can and will learn, and knows how to go about tackling problems, he will be armed and ready to engage in learning experiences. Before teaching content, we need to make sure children have the social and emotional skills they need to learn new content. Social-emotional teaching is always the first step for more academic teaching.

Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs reinforces the same conclusion. Children need to develop social and emotional skills to be ready to learn. At the bottom of Maslow’s needs pyramid, we can see that children need food, shelter, and a sense of safety and security before anything else. At the next levels, they need to feel good about themselves and their abilities, and they need to be able to have a friend and be a friend. Children are ready for the next level only after they have met all these physical, social, and emotional needs. A child without strong social-emotional skills is no more ready to learn than a hungry or sleepy child is ready to learn. Children whose basic needs are not met will focus most of their energy and attention on filling those needs before they put energies toward learning new things. Not only will the child be unable to learn during this time, but his behavior will get in the way of other children’s learning as he tries to get his basic needs met.

Teaching and learning do not take place in a vacuum. Teaching and learning involve the whole child--physically, socially, emotionally, and cognitively. Make sure that all the children in your care not only have the recipes and ingredients they need for learning, but also have the prerequisite social and emotional skills and attitudes to be successful learners. Help every child make that cake turn out right.

Jenna Bilmes works as a mental health specialist with Southwest Human Development Center in Phoenix, AZ. As a consultant for the U.S. Department of Defense Dependent Schools and Sonoma State University, she develops teacher manuals for social and emotional education. Her new book Beyond Behavior Management: The Six Life Skills Children Need to Thrive in Today’s World, is available from Redleaf Press. Free shipping on this title is available through November 15, 2004.