Category Archives: Book Reviews

How are you feeling? We ask this question often because our feelings are an important source of information about our internal lives, yet too often we do not ask or answer with sincerity. Marc Brackett, a Yale professor and Director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, argues that our emotions, though messy, make us human. Further, when we deny ourselves permission to feel, as we often do, we as individuals and a society suffer adverse consequences. In Permission to Feel: Unlocking the Power of Emotions to Help Our Kids, Ourselves, and our Society Thrive Brackett draws on his extensive research expertise and personal experiences to teach skills for recognizing, understanding, labeling, expressing, and regulating emotions. This book will be of interest to readers wishing to improve their own emotional lives, parents striving to better support their children’s social-emotional skills, educators wishing to implement high-quality social-emotional learning initiatives, employers and employees wishing to improve both the culture at work and the bottom line, and those interested in working towards a more equitable, creative, and compassionate society.

Although western philosophical tradition contends that emotions interfere with rational thought, since Darwin we have understood that emotions are important for our survival, shaping our learning, memory, decision-making, and actions, and health. Brackett details the ways in which our culture of ignoring emotions is adversely affecting all of us, and especially young people. Fortunately, emotional skills (i.e., skills for magnifying our strengths and navigating through social challenges) can be taught Teaching these skills can improve well-being, creativity, academic performance, relationship quality, and leadership skills. Brackett and colleagues developed the RULER framework to summarize the critical skills for building emotional competency.

The first skill in the RULER acronym is recognizing emotions through verbal and non-verbal signals in ourselves and others.  Factors such as culture, personality, context, and technology can affect our ability to recognize emotions. A “mood meter,” which sorts emotions based on the degree of pleasantness and on the degree of energy or arousal, can be helpful in understanding the range of emotions that exist and how they relate to one another.

The second RULER skill, and perhaps the hardest to master, is understanding emotions or seeking to answer why one feels a certain way. We should listen to others’ emotional experiences not just to be sympathetic but also to discover the underlying causes of their experiences. Brackett suggests we act like “emotion scientists” developing and testing hypotheses about why we feel certain ways and seeking to gather evidence through question-asking that supports or refutes these hypotheses.

Although there are over 2,000 emotion-related words in English, in general Americans, know and use relatively few emotion words. Labeling emotions facilitates making sense of our emotional experiences, regulating emotions, and helping one another. As such, labeling acts as a hinge between the recognition and understanding components of RULER and the expression and regulation components.

Expressing emotions, including negative emotions, and listening to others’ expressions of emotion are key for understanding, empathizing, and helping one another. Expressing emotions can help build supportive relationships. The final component of RULER, regulating emotions, provides individuals power over which emotions they experience, when and how they experience them, and how they express their emotions. Brackett suggests a few helpful strategies for regulating emotions, including mindful breathing to calm the body and mind, reinterpreting the cause of an emotional experience to change the experience, and planning ahead to avoid triggers of unwanted emotional experiences. He suggests also shifting attention away from stressful encounters, engaging in self-talk, and taking a moment to pause before making decisions with long-term consequences based on short-term emotions.

Emotional regulation is a lifelong journey. Parents can support their children’s emotional skills by honing their own emotional skills and by initiating family conversations about the emotional culture and expectations in the family. Both teachers and students are experiencing a high degree of stress in school. Students will do better in the classroom when they have a strong relationship with their teachers and when they can learn material that feels relevant and important. Teachers understand the importance of social-emotional learning but many feel that they do not have the time or know-how to teach it. Based on his extensive experience introducing the RULER curriculum to schools, Brackett suggests that strong school-based social-emotional learning initiatives require buy-in from all staff, should be practiced daily in a proactive (not reactive) manner and should be integrated into the curriculum across all grade levels and developmental stages.

With the clear, personal, and research-backed insight Brackett strives for nothing short of creating a better society, by encouraging us all to give ourselves and others permission to feel.

Brackett, M. (2019). Permission to feel: Unlocking the power of emotions to help our kids, ourselves, and our society thrive. Celadon Books.

Letting go of the concern “am I good enough” and reducing self-focused thoughts are critical for building self-confidence, according to clinical psychologist and author, Eileen Kennedy-Moore. She suggests that supporting kids as they develop relationships, habits of perseverance, skills for learning, and their own value and voice are the key to building authentic self-confidence. Kennedy-Moore’s book, Kid Confidence: Help Your Child Make Friends, Build Resilience, and Develop Real Self-Esteem brings parents scientifically backed, clear, and actionable practices for supporting self-esteem in children ages 6-12.

Previous efforts to boost children’s self-esteem (e.g., by giving every child a trophy) were misguided and counter-productive, leading to narcissism, reduced empathy, depression, and anxiety. Self-esteem is shaped by both natural temperament and experience. Children tend to have relatively high self-esteem in the first several years of life and then experience a reduction in self-esteem and an increase in self-consciousness in the pre-teen and teen years, when they become more self-focused.

Strong and healthy connections with parents, siblings, and friends are a critical source of confidence for young people. Kennedy-Moore suggests that how parents respond to children’s mistakes matters for their self-esteem. She suggests sequentially taking time to cool down, then broaching a conversation with the child by offering an excuse for why the child may have made the mistake, describing why the mistake was problematic, and encouraging the child to think about how he can ameliorate the situation and move forward. Conversely when children do something well, parents should show pleasure, offer measured praise, especially for actions within the child’s control, and teach children how to graciously accept compliments. Parents should teach children that we are all developing and have room for improvement. Sibling relations can boost self-esteem, but when a child compares himself to his siblings, which is common to do, problems may arise. Kennedy-Moore suggests parents avoid comparing siblings and instead celebrate each child’s successes and focus on shared values and traits in the family. To make friends children need not to avoid off-putting behaviors (e.g., emotional outbursts and tattle-tailing), so teaching self-calming exercises can be beneficially. Additionally, they need to build connections, so it is important to teaching about the role of reciprocity, kindness, and common-ground in friendships.

To experience self-confidence, children need to feel competent, which comes when they persist at difficult but worthwhile endeavors and when they let go of perfectionism, according to Kennedy-Moore. Parents can promote persistence by normalizing the experience of struggling.  Stories of their own struggles or stories of the child overcome struggles when she was younger are effective. Parents can help children notice their own progress, guide children to engage in activities that will capitalize on their strengths, and help children find mentors. Parents can help counter perfectionism by: creating safe spaces to make mistakes; focusing on the learning process rather than performance outcomes; teaching the value of matching one’s effort to the importance of the task; and emphasizing that parents’ love does not need to be earned. Kennedy-Moore also suggests encouraging self-kindness by modeling kind self-talk and making time for fun activities.

Children with low self-esteem may struggle to make even simple decisions. Parents can deconstruct common myths about decision-making, e.g., teaching that there is no singular perfect choice to be uncovered if one simply analyzes the situation thoroughly enough. Parents can give kids opportunities to make simple choices and show that we need to make the most of the decisions we make.

Children with low self-esteem may also feel different than their peers. Parents can help by teaching children how to talk about their differences with pride and how to deal with prejudice. Offering examples of inspiring people with similar differences, helping the child see himself as a whole-person and not just someone with one difference, and encouraging children to contribute their talents to help others are ways to reduce feelings of “differentness.” Additionally, teaching children about media biases can reduce the extent to which the media exacerbates their feelings of differentness. If children are facing bullying, parents can help their children learn to be a less attractive target for bullying by caring less about the bullying behavior and learning to ignore mean gossip. It may be necessary also to enlist help from a teacher.

Kennedy-Moore concludes by suggesting that helping children move past the frequent self-evaluation that undermines confidence, involves them experiencing compassion, awe, and deep engagement with activities.  These experiences connect us to other people, make us appreciate the vastness of our world, and ground us in the present moment. As children come to have more and more of these experiences, they will develop genuine and enduring self-esteem, which will set them on a trajectory of success and fulfillment.

Kennedy-Moore, E. (2019). Kid Confidence: Help Your Child Make Friends, Build Resilience, and Develop Real Self-Esteem. Oakland, CA: New Harbinger Publications.