Emotional ABCs

Emotional ABCs teaches children the basics of emotional regulation. Just like with learning the regular ABCs, these are skills that, once learned, you use all day, every day, for a lifetime. Emotional ABCs is currently free for teachers and school counselors at brick and mortar schools worldwide

Emotional ABCs is a web app designed to work on any device on the Google Chrome, Firefox and and Safari browsers. The program is designed for teachers to jump right in and begin teaching. Although teacher training is provided in the app, it is not necessary for teachers to instruct using the curriculum. In less than 3 years since going live online our curriculum has been taken up by educators in 118,000 schools in 120 countries. Our solution focuses on foundational emotional skills, just like learning to swim, we give teach skills that children can use every day: we give them tools to figure out What they're feeling, Why they're experiencing that emotion, and how to make good choices (that are just right for them) in response to what they're going through. 

Our program is aimed at children ages 4-11, although in the USA alone, more than 38,000 special education classrooms with kids of all ages, have also signed up to use our free teacher curriculum. We have also had a very large impact in underserved communities across the country looking for an evidence-based curriculum that engages all types of learnings. Children and educators are responding well to the material as you can see from recent reviews: www.facebook.com/EmotionalABCs/reviews

Emotional ABCs is built with input from psychologists, therapists, and educators. We invite and use feedback from parents, school counselors, administrators, behavioral health experts, and, of course from children themselves. Our aim is to grow by adding new languages so that we can more successfully serve children everywhere. 

We think that insights from partners on how to help children in other markets would be invaluable. This includes discussions about adding other languages, connectivity issues, inability to use the same types of learning materials, etc. Also, of course, we don't know what we don't know. And we'd like to have a broader team to get a more diverse perspective. Currently, our advisory team includes psychologists, therapists, educators, and MBAs from Harvard, Stanford, and the like. We'd love to expand this and get input from areas that we don't expect that can broaden our outlook.

Hmm. Social Emotional Learning (SEL) is now quite a thing in the USA. We began our business more than 10 years ago. This was when we'd asked a married pair of psychologists for a recommendation of a good primer on emotional regulation and they'd told us there wasn't one. Disbelieving them, and trying to help our young child, we looked on Amazon. We didn't like what we found and continued to speak with professionals. Soon, we realized we could work with professionals and build the primer we sought. We believe our program is the best online curriculum for teaching foundational emotional regulation. While other curricula do a wonderful job with all sorts of topics, we believe that we really do teach the emotional ABCs. We believe our program is slower, more thorough, and skill-based in a way that differentiates it from the competition--when children do our program, they pay attention, they learn, they use the skills, and they often end up teaching their classmates. It's something to see.

I'm not sure this is my favorite question. We have been doing this for 10 years now and our goals change. We have short term plans, and long term plans, and these change, often. We get input from all sorts of places and these make liars of us quite often. Our plan is to help kids learn how to better manage their emotions so they can have these 21st century skills to transform our world and repair the world. The more children we teach these skills, and the better job we do, the more we are fulfilling our personal goals as owners of this business. (My wife, Cynthia Sikes, is the Chief Creative Officer of Emotional ABCs.)

Well, probably Global Health and Well Begin is the "list of indicators" answer but our aims are really twofold and they're still questions--how can we help as many children as we can and how can we do a great job helping them/making sure our program is effective for the children?

Emotional ABCs has done a study that proves our curriculum works. 

https://www.emotionalabcs.com/...

But, more importantly, it is feedback from teachers, counselors, therapists, and the children that shows us what we're doing and where we're succeeding.

Our program is currently a web app that runs on any device on the Google Chrome, Firefox and Safari browsers.

Most of the senior people on the Emotional ABCs team are women. We have made an effort to hire members of our team that are from minority and previously disadvantaged groups. 

We give away subscriptions to schools. In addition, we sell premium subscriptions to schools and to parents.

Revenue from sales of subscriptions.

So far we're doing okay.