week 12 post 1

Week 12

The implementation of social emotional intelligence strategies and mindfulness exercises in k-12 schools should be mandatory.

It occured to me that I haven't looked enough into WHY kids are sad and why that is so directly correlated to school in modern times.

https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/four_lessons_from_inside_out_to_discuss_with_kids 

Four Lessons from “Inside Out” to Discuss With Kids

BY  JASON MARSH,  VICKI ZAKRZEWSKI

• It has moved viewers young and old to take a look inside their own minds.
• Dacher Keltner, served as a consultant on the film, helping to make sure that, despite some obvious creative liberties, the film’s fundamental messages about emotion are consistent with scientific research.
• Though Inside Out has artfully opened the door to these conversations, it can still be hard to find the right way to move through them or respond to kids’ questions.

1) Happiness is not just about joy.

• there is much, much more to being happy than boundless positivity. In fact, in the film’s final chapter, when Joy cedes control to some of her fellow emotions, particularly Sadness, Riley seems to achieve a deeper form of happiness.
• Sonja Lyubomirsky, author of the best-selling How of Happiness, defines happiness as “the experience of joy, contentment, or positive well-being, combined with a sense that one’s life is good, meaningful, and worthwhile.”

2) Don’t try to force happiness. 

• Riley’s mother tells her to be her parents’ “happy girl” while the family adjusts to a stressful cross-country move and her father goes through a difficult period at work. As a child, Vicki got similar messages and used to think something was wrong with her if she wasn’t happy all the time. And all the research and press about the importance of happiness in recent years can make this message that much more potent.
• making happiness an explicit goal in life can actually make us miserable.
• deliberately carving out ample time in life for experiences that we personally enjoy. For Riley, that’s ice hockey, spending time with friends, and goofing around with her parents.’

3) Sadness is vital to our well-being

• many of us have probably wondered what purpose sadness serves in our lives.
• that Sadness rather than Joy emerges as the hero of the movie. Why? Because Sadness connects deeply with people—a critical component of happiness—and helps Riley do the same. For example, when Riley’s long-forgotten imaginary friend Bing Bong feels dejected after the loss of his wagon, it is Sadness’s empathic understanding that helps him recover, not Joy’s attempt to put a positive spin on his loss. 
• Inside Out shows how tough emotions like sadness, fear, and anger, can be extremely uncomfortable for people to experience—which is why many of us go to great lengths to avoid them (see the next section). But in the film, as in real life, all of these emotions serve an important purpose by providing insight into our inner and outer environments in ways that can help us connect with others, avoid danger, or recover from loss.

4) Mindfully embrace—rather than suppress—tough emotions. 

• “emotional suppression”—an emotion-regulation strategy that has been found to lead to anxiety and depression, 
• Cognitive reappraisal is a strategy that has historically been considered the most effective way to regulate emotions. But even this method of emotion regulation is not always the best approach, as researchers have found that it can sometimes increase rather than decrease depression, depending on the situation
•  Instead of avoiding or denying Sadness, Joy accepts Sadness for who she is, realizing that she is an important part of Riley’s emotional life.
• depressed adolescents and young adults who took a mindful approach to life showed lower levels of depression, anxiety, and bad attitudes, as well as a greater quality of life.

https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/sadness_changes_how_boys_relate_to_others

Sadness Changes How Boys Relate to Others

BY MARYAM ABDULLAH 

• parents like to try different strategies to inspire kids to be generous, but some new research suggests that sharing may also depend on kids’ moods
•  feeling sad affected sharing in nearly 100 five- and six-year-old children living in Northern China.
• The children were randomly assigned to watch either a neutral or sad video clip from Disney’s The Lion King. In one group, kids watched Simba and his father, Lion King Mufasa, having a daily conversation about the rules of nature. In the other group, kids watched Simba cry when he found his father was dead.
•  the researchers invited the children to play a sharing game with two puppets.  
• One puppet was rich—it had a sticker book full of stickers; the other puppet was poor—it had only one sticker. The researchers gave the children tokens, which represented stickers, that they could keep for themselves or share with the puppets. After they completed three rounds in which they decided how to share two, three, or four tokens, the researchers asked the children, “Why did you share in this way?” and “Which puppet do you like better and why?
•  the researchers found that boys shared fewer stickers after watching the sad video compared to the neutral video; girls shared equally after both videos. What’s more, boys shared fewer stickers compared to girls after watching the sad video.
•  boys provided more self-focused reasons after watching the sad video compared to the neutral one. That is, their reasons focused on their own preferences, such as “I want to get more stickers” or “I like him,” rather than other-focused reasons, like “He looks nice” or “It is good to share.” On the other hand, there was no difference in girls’ reasoning after the neutral and sad videos.
• But sadness didn’t affect how boys or girls treated rich and poor puppets. The majority of boys and girls—68 percent—preferred the rich one. But there was no difference in the number of stickers children shared with the rich and poor puppets after watching either video
• While one study of young American children found that they preferred to share more with the poor than the wealthy, another study found that Chinese preschoolers preferred equal distributions. Guo and her colleagues write, “Collectivism in Chinese culture encourages people to distribute equally to maintain close relationship[s] with others.”
• They remind us that there are different ways to respond to negative feelings, and that we might be raising boys and girls to favor one or the other. Sometimes, negative emotions (like fear) drive us to defensively collect resources and be more cautious in the face of possible threats. But other times, negative emotions (like sadness or loneliness) can prompt us to reach out to others and strengthen relationships

https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/school_success_v_happiness 

High GPAs, Low Happiness?

• When you look at the studies of college-bound kids with high GPAs, the picture is not rosy.

It’s a portrait of chronic stress and sleep deprivation, pressure and depression—not one of passionate and joyful learners.

• succeeding in school might not be a “happiness habit.” Consider that in a study of kids from high-performing California high schools, 70 percent of the students “often or always feel stressed by their school work, and 56 percent reported often or always worrying about such things as grades, tests, and college acceptance.”
• Although some level of stress can, of course, be motivating or even healthy, chronic stress like what these students describe is very damaging to their developing minds and bodies. A quarter of the students in that study struggle with depression, and 7 percent had recently cut themselves, which people sometimes do to make emotional pain physical. 
• Many kids use drugs and alcohol to cope; one student said, “When I feel especially stressed out, I feel like intoxication is the best way out.”
• The number of kids and teens being treated for depression has doubled in the past five years; a quarter of teenagers felt “sad or depressed every day for two or more weeks” at least once during the previous year.
• Suicides, particularly among girls, are on the rise. Among tweener girls ages 10-14, suicides were up 76 percent between 2003 and 2004; among teenage girls ages 15-19, suicides increased 32 percent. In 2007, 15 percent of kids “seriously considered attempting suicide;” seven percent actually attempted to kill themselves at least once.Suicide is the 3rd leading cause of death among kids ages 10 to 24.
• Twenty percent of students at two Ivy League schools report “purposely injuring themselves by cutting, burning, or other methods.”
• 5.5 million kids and teens are treated for sports injuries every year; one study indicates that about 50-70 percent of these injuries are attributable to overuse. Kids will get hurt playing sports, yes—but they’ll get hurt more often if we are pushing them too hard.
•  kids themselves report being exhausted. Teenagers need 9.25 hours of sleep per night, but the majority average only seven hours, and 25 percent get six hours or less. Younger kids are exhausted, too: first through fifth graders need 10-11 hours of sleep at night, but only 29 percent actually get that much.
• most teens resort to cheating in their quest to get ahead. Ninety-five percent of high school juniors and seniors say they cheated on a test, and 90 percent of middle schoolers admit that they have cheated. Kids feel that they need to cheat—rather than learn—in order to do well in school.
• Cheating doesn’t feel good. It makes kids feel badly about themselves, even when they don’t feel especially guilty. Learning, on the other hand, does make kids feel good.
• Schools, of course, need to change their homework and testing policies. It sounds like a tall order, but it is possible. For evidence, look no further than Challenge Success, a research-based program that has shown measurable success in helping schools reduce student stress and support their physical and emotional well-being.
• This program works. Kids who participate in it actually do better in school, even when they spend less time doing homework and less time worrying about their grades.
• Not all kids are suffering, and we’ll do well to understand why. For example, students at The Thacher School, in Ojai, CA, show remarkable physical and emotional health despite intense preparation for college. (Disclosure: I’m on Thacher’s board.)