Are the kids all right?
Adults need to pay more attention to children's moral, emotional intelligence
Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “Character is more important than intellect.”
In an era where our children's education has become highly politicized and curricula are shaped not only by teachers but also politicians and social activists, it may be important to hit the pause button and return to basics. There has never been a better time to think deeply about how we want to build our children's future based on facts and science rather than subjectivity.
In this context, I am guessing it was not an accident that I recently opened a book that sits on my study's shelf. This book has remained untouched for two decades. It is one of the most popular books ever written by a distinguished Harvard pediatric psychiatrist. It skilfully looks at the science of teaching children values.
Dr. Robert Coles, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Spiritual Life of Children, also wrote the book I am talking about — The Moral Intelligence of Children.
Coles published more than 1,300 articles, reviews and essays in newspapers, magazines, journals and anthologies. He wrote more than 60 books and received several awards, including the prestigious Dale Richmond Award in Child Development, awarded by the American Academy of Pediatrics in 1998. I was honoured to be in the room when the academy presented the award to Coles and I remember his amazing intellect but most of all, his humility and kindness.
When we hear the word “moral,” most will confuse it with religion. Morals go beyond religion or dogma. In the academic world, the study of morals consists of four competencies: integrity, responsibility, forgiveness and compassion.
When we hear the word “intelligence,” most think of IQ tests, verbal and mathematical skills. But intelligence is much bigger than that.
Dr. Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences, first described in 1983, identified seven distinct intelligences. Gardner focused on verbal, visual, mathematical, musical, bodily, interpersonal and intrapersonal bits of intelligence. Gardner since then added an eighth — nature.
The list of intelligences seems to be never-ending. Daniel Goleman's concept of emotional intelligence (EQ) remains popular even 25 years after he wrote his bestselling book Emotional Intelligence. EQ refers to five domains: self-awareness, managing emotions, motivating oneself, empathy and handling relationships.
Based on my experiences over the years in my clinic, and also as a father, I am more and more inclined to care less about the views of experts and administrators, and more about the actual needs of children.
We are living in an unusual era, an era that is captured dramatically by a recent summit held by the AAP on suicide prevention. Many children are overwhelmed by things now that were not at play a few decades ago and many, sadly, end their lives.
At the summit, presenters shared a survey of AAP members which revealed that before the pandemic, 44 per cent of pediatricians had a patient attempt to die by suicide in the previous year.
In 2019 in the U.S., 8.9 per cent of high school students reported a suicide attempt. Suicide has become the second leading cause of death for individuals ages 10 to 24. Dr. Lee Beers, the current president of the AAP, states,
“The increasing rate of suicide among children and adolescents is an incredibly serious and growing health concern.” The need for pediatricians and family physicians to become skilled at screening for suicidal ideation has never been more acute.
When I reflect on moral intelligence, elegantly written about in Cole's book, and how children develop such a skill, it reminds me of tanning or fitness. One can return in the dead of winter from a sunny vacation in Mexico, but under cloudy, chilly Canadian skies, the tan will fade rapidly. One can run many marathons, but when dialing back on weekly mileage, fitness levels deteriorate rapidly. In other words, moral intelligence is an issue of cultivation from an early age and it has to be ongoing.
When children are in the preschool phase of their lives they are relatively protected and parental role modelling plays a huge role. Once they get immersed into school, exposed to peers and social media and a materialistic world, the task becomes that much harder.
Research has shown that instruction alone is ineffective. Almost 100 years ago, researchers found that children who knew the right kinds of behaviour in hypothetical situations failed to practise this behaviour in real life and that children who went to Sunday school or belonged to the Boys and Girls Scouts were just as dishonest as children who were not exposed to similar ethical instruction.
Clearly, if our education system continues to focus only on academics, and specifically a STEM curriculum, we may be heading in a worse direction. It is time to depoliticize curricula and focus on the actual needs of children and enable them to survive and thrive for a lifetime.