Little Kids/Big Emotions: Promoting Emotional Intelligence in Preschool Children

Ways to Work Together

Offerings

Three ways to bring emotional-intelligence training to your preschool staff, your parent community, or an individual child.

Preschool Staff Training

In-service training for your preschool staff, onsite at your facility.

Two hands-on sessions that give your staff a simple framework for responding to big feelings — plus techniques to teach kids emotional-regulation skills, with take-home handouts.

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Teaching is great fun for Susan, who believes it should be fun for participants too. Her workshops are structured but casual, with lots of group discussion and break-out sessions to facilitate further conversations. She likes to do teacher training as two sessions, ideally 1½ hours each and scheduled somewhat close together. The first session focuses on issues related to emotional intelligence and a simple formula for how adults can respond when kids are upset or angry. The follow-up training then focuses on techniques adults can use to teach children emotional-regulation skills. Handouts are provided to support this learning going forward.

Parent Group Presentations

Presentations for your parent groups, at your facility.

A lively, discussion-based session at your facility — topic-driven or open, always warm and practical.

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These parent group discussions can be topic-driven or open-ended. Open-ended discussions begin with Susan asking parents, "What would you like help with?", "Who else is dealing with this?" and "How do you handle it?", followed by her own thoughts and suggestions. The result is invariably a lively conversation with parents chiming in freely. These sessions have been described as fun and helpful.

Individual Observation

Observation of an individual student of concern, with follow-up for teachers and parents.

Susan observes a child of concern in the classroom, then delivers a written report and follow-up guidance for teachers and parents.

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It is not unusual for preschool teachers to find one or more children in their class whose behavior is worrisome or perplexing. Upon request, Susan can arrange a convenient time to come to your classroom to observe a child. This is best done with at least a two-hour session in both morning and afternoon. She then generates a report to be shared with teachers and parents describing those observations and offering recommendations as appropriate. Follow-up meetings with the child's teachers and also with the parents, when appropriate, have proven very helpful.

Ready to bring this to your school or parent group? Get in touch and let's set it up.

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The Foundation

What Is Emotional Intelligence?

Emotional intelligence (EQ) can be learned at any age — but early childhood is when it matters most. That's when lifelong habits take root, so even a small shift in how a young child learns to handle big feelings can have an outsized effect on the rest of their life. Here's what strong EQ looks like in practice:

Self-awareness — understanding your own emotional triggers
Self-regulation — staying calm and responsive, not reactive
Empathy — reading and relating to others' emotions

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Emotional intelligence is the ability to correctly identify and understand one's own emotions and the emotions of others, then manage those feelings in a highly effective and adaptive manner. Unlike intellectual capacity (IQ), which is fixed at birth, emotional intelligence (EQ) can be learned and continue to develop throughout life. Numerous studies have shown that good emotional intelligence is the highest predictor of life satisfaction and adult wellbeing, exceeding even the satisfaction of career or relationship success.

The healthy management of feelings involves a number of skills that, collectively, are referred to as emotional self-regulation. It begins with high levels of self-awareness, recognizing how emotions drive thoughts and behavior in ourselves and others, and how emotions impact the state of our nervous systems. People with good emotional intelligence know how to sort out what's going on and calm themselves when emotionally triggered, making them less reactive. They recognize the impact of their emotions on other people. They have empathy for others and the ability to understand someone else's perspective. All this leads to good social skills and interpersonal relationships that are largely gratifying. These folks are good at conflict management, stress tolerance and stress reduction. They are open to others rather than defensive. They are adaptable, resilient and self-motivated. They have good self-esteem and their overall outlook is optimistic.

Little Kids/Big Emotions: The Preschool Years

Preschoolers feel everything at full volume — meltdowns, exuberance, big fears — because their brains haven't yet grown the capacity to reason through emotion. That's exactly why this is the best time to start building lifelong emotional skills.

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Preschool years are dominated by big feelings: tantrums, tears, exuberance, seemingly unreasonable fears, freezing, the joy of mastery and more. Little kids often feel swamped by all this because their developing brains haven't yet grown the capacity for reasoning. They experience their emotions as powerful body sensations and act them out through behavior, yielding the meltdowns that are so frequent in this age group.

They need our help to manage their emotional fluctuations. Starting this guidance in preschool avoids the pitfalls of grade school, where emotional imbalances are viewed as behavior problems to be corrected. Let's help our children manage their emotional lives before that can happen. Together, we can build a generation of children with good mental health and self-esteem.

The Practice

How Can This Be Taught in Preschool and at Home?

It begins with teachers and parents recognizing that all emotional outbursts have a trigger — and it comes down to three moves.

1

Pause & Coregulate

When a child melts down, the calmest adult in the room sets the tone. Coregulation means lending your own settled nervous system to theirs.

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"Bad" behavior in kids is almost never because a child wants to create a problem, but rather because they don't know how else to manage. The supervising adult needs to mentally pause in response to this behavior and ask themselves what has prompted it — the first step in helping kids manage overwhelming emotions.

Coregulation is the act of the adult essentially lending their sense of calm to the child. It occurs when the adult lets go of their own reactivity and connects with the child from a place of calm neutrality and respect. It can look as simple and passive as just sitting near a tantruming child, maintaining one's own peaceful composure until that calm rubs off on the child.

2

Name the Feeling

Naming what's happening — "You're really angry" — helps kids understand their own experience, and a little empathy goes a long way.

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Naming the emotion helps the child begin to understand what's going on when they're melting down. Statements like "You're really angry" or "That was scary" are validating and supportive and help an out-of-control child begin to shift.

After naming the feeling, expressions of empathy help enormously. This can sound like "I know that's hard. I get angry sometimes too." Children assume their experiences and feelings are unique to them. It is incredibly reassuring for them to hear that others share similar emotional experiences and can manage them without overwhelm. This is where emotional self-regulation — the key to emotional intelligence — begins.

3

Teach the Skills (When Calm)

Breathing techniques, movement, songs, and everyday moments — taught outside the meltdown — become tools kids can reach for when big feelings hit.

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There are many practical tools children can be taught to deal with big emotions. However, such teaching can only happen when calm is restored because a child having an emotional meltdown is a child whose immature brain has been hijacked by overwhelming sensations. A child in that state is incapable of reasoning or learning new skills. This is why teachers and parents need to consciously teach emotional management skills as a regular part of a child's day. Practicing those skills when calm gives kids tools to employ when big feelings hit.

Emotionally intelligent people have a wide variety of tools they employ to manage overwhelming emotions, many of which can be taught to young children. These include numerous techniques for focusing on and directing the breath, the release of excess physical energy brought on by excess/difficult emotions, singing and humming, specific physical movements to restore a sense of agency, and others. Recognizing the emotional cues of those around us builds on these skills by instilling empathy.

Preschool teachers and parents promote emotional intelligence in young children by incorporating such teaching in their daily interactions with kids. Sometimes it happens as a game; sometimes it happens through casual comments and observations; sometimes it happens by reflecting on the emotional experiences of characters in the books we read to them. Teachers and parents who consciously employ this approach lay vital groundwork for the lifelong well-being of children in their care.

Want Susan to bring this approach to your classroom or home? Let's talk.

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About

Susan C. Gann, Teacher Trainer/Parent Coach

Susan pairs a Masters in Early Childhood Education with a Masters in Mental Health from Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and 20 years as a child psychotherapist — now channeled into training preschool teachers and parents.

M.A. Early Childhood Education
7 years as preschool teacher & program director
M.A. Mental Health, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine
20 years, child psychotherapy & parent counseling
Parent Advisor, New School of Berkeley — since 2022

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Susan is passionate about building emotional intelligence in young children, having spent much of her adult life in that pursuit. She began her professional career with a Masters in Early Childhood Education, working as a preschool teacher and program director for 7 years. She then returned to graduate school, obtaining a Masters of Mental Health from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Utilizing this combined training, she worked as a child psychotherapist and parent counselor for 20 years before moving to California. Susan's focus then shifted to teaching with parents and babies and the application of energy medicine for physical and emotional healing. Devotion to the healing arts brought her back to her foundation: working with children and parents to build positive mental health. Along the way, this journey has taught her the importance of emotional intelligence as her own has flourished.

Since 2022, Susan has served as Parent Advisor to the New School of Berkeley, a respected and well-established preschool in the San Francisco East Bay area. She also sits on New School's Board of Directors and has provided emotional intelligence in-service training to New School staff. She is available to provide similar training to parents and other preschools in the community.

In Their Words

Susan's workshops with our teaching staff have been incredibly valuable. She has a gift for making emotional intelligence both practical and approachable.

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Her trainings are engaging and thoughtful, encourage meaningful reflection, are connected to the realities of the classroom, and give teachers strategies they can implement immediately. Susan has also provided insightful classroom observations and consultations that have helped us better support individual children and strengthen our teaching practices. I highly recommend her to any early childhood program looking for meaningful, high-quality professional development.

Brad Wagner Director, The New School of Berkeley

Susan Gann has been volunteering at The New School of Berkeley for over three years. Her initial parent workshop, loosely titled "Transitions and Behavior," was so well received that it became a quarterly series.

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These informal sessions have been a valuable guide for our parents to understand childhood behavioral issues more thoroughly, to get a better grasp of their child's emotional growth, and to work on strategies to handle these situations. Susan is always available to support parents by phone, email, and in person. Her passion for emotional intelligence in young children has resulted in interesting and informative workshops for preschool educators and parents. Her presentation at a recent professional development training was well received, resulting in lively discussions with our staff. I highly recommend Susan's workshops and trainings for your staff and community.

Dolores Martinez Assistant Director, The New School of Berkeley

Susan supported our family for years. She shared thoughtful and practical tools that helped soothe our daughter — and us!

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We recommend her guidance to any other caregiver looking for support that is curious, informed and kind. Her insights, ideas and activities made tricky transitions easier and took the pressure off us to be the experts.

Zoe Lake Parent, The New School of Berkeley

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Let's Talk

Interested in bringing this training to your preschool or parent group? Reach out and Susan will get back to you.

Email Susan