Emotional ABCs

Emotional ABCs would use their Elevate Prize funding to expand use of their program in the USA and across the world. Teachers and school counselors love our program but getting the information to these educators is not free and if you want to get the information to a lot of educators it can be expensive. In addition, we would use the extra funding to expand our offering to include other languages. Because our program is interactive the cost of doing this is higher than a site that is mere text to be translated.

Emotional ABCs was begun, quite literally, as an attempt to help our own child. There were no equivalent programs when we began our journey a decade ago. And it grew. Emotional ABCs is, quite literally, the ABCs of emotional regulation. We teach children what emotions are. For example: What are you feeling? How do you know you're experiencing an emotion? What is your body telling you that gives you clues to what you might be feeling? Then our program teaches children to reach back to try to figure out the reasons underlying what they may be experiencing. What happened? And, lastly, the program focuses on how we can make better choices in response to our feelings. If one imagines, for example, a mere week in one's own life, and then considers what a difference it might have made in our life to have made better emotional choices in only ten percent of the decisions one made that week, one can begin to realize the power of better emotional regulation skills. Our aim is to give every child these tools.

Emotional ABCs teaches children, ages 4-11, basic emotional regulation. These skills are important because they impact every facet of our lives and, perhaps most importantly, how well we are able to learn. Our free Emotional ABCs Classroom program is now used by educators and school counselors in more than 65,000 schools across the USA and in more than 90 countries. We teach kids how to figure out what they're feeling, why they might be having that emotion, and how to make better choices in response to what they might be experiencing. These are skills that can have a huge impact over a lifetime. 

There are other Social Emotional Learning (SEL) programs both in the USA and elsewhere both as apps and web applications. We believe ours is the most successful because ours is the slowest. What we mean by this is that we believe our program goes as slow as necessary for each child, if possible, to learn each letter of their Emotional ABCs. Just like learning to read, it is letter by letter. And you need to repeat the letters in different ways so that the children learn them and know how to use them before moving onto the next letter, and the next word in their emotional vocabulary. Only then can you begin to speak the language of emotions. Also, of course, our program is funny. Our character's name is Moody. It's hard for him to learn. He struggles and stumbles and fails. And the kids have to help to teach him these skills too. 

We think that children who learn better emotional skills become adults with better emotional skills. This can have a huge generational impact.