What Are Social-Emotional-Spiritual Life Skills?

Catherine Carr

“It’s easier to build strong children than to repair broken adults.” - Frederick Douglass

Social-Emotional Learning may be the next great frontier of education. In a world that’s increasingly overwhelmed with information and the opinions of strangers, teaching kids to recognize, process, and respond in healthy ways to their emotions is more important than ever. With formal religious education becoming less common and economic demands on parents growing at the same time our media landscape becomes more dangerous, teaching students to respect, support, empathize with, and connect with others is also increasingly important.

These are not theoretical needs, nor is this the usual moral panic over the state of young generations. In recent years, health organizations around the world have characterized the state of mental health among children and adolescents as “an emergency,” with depression, anxiety, and disordered behavior being the largest cause of disability among teens globally. Scientists began to raise alarms in the early 2020s when data showed that, globally, the youngest generation is now the most unhappy age group—when previous decades of research found that teens and children were among the happiest people in society.

The benefits of Social-Emotional Learning are also proven. According to the Yale School of Medicine, an analysis of 424 experiments testing the effects of SEL curricula in 50 countries found that students who received SEL education showed improvements to academic performance, improved school attendance, and scored higher on measures of self-esteem, mental health, perseverance, and optimism. Students’ self-reported levels of depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation dropped while grades, test scores, and relationships with adults in their lives improved.

So, problem solved, right? Mental health and well-being in young people are declining precipitously, and we have a solution that improves it. 

But what if the puzzle isn’t complete? The term “Social-Emotional Learning” was just coined in 1994, and the global mental health and religious landscape has shifted drastically over the past 30 years. Edwina Cowell, the founding mother of Spiritual Playdate, believes that SEL must step in to support young people’s spiritual health as well as their social-emotional health.

“Spirituality is a key part of how people experience the world,” Cowell says. “Religions have always treated spiritual health as something that goes beyond mental, emotional, and social health, and frankly I think that’s correct. Spirituality is how people understand big questions of meaning, purpose, and their personal relationship to the cosmos. Spiritual beliefs are a basic human behavior; they’re one of the first things invented by any culture. We can’t just ignore them when we’re talking about the youth mental health crisis.”

This leads to one inevitable question, often asked by religious and secular leaders alike: what even is spirituality? And that is one of the key questions Cowell seeks to tackle with Spiritual Playdate’s curriculum of Social-Emotional-Spiritual education for kids ages 5-11.

The term “spirit” itself has a rich history. Deriving from the same root word as “inspiration”—which means both “to breathe in” and “to be mentally or creatively stimulated”—spirit is today considered to refer to the non-physical part of a person. It is the seat of emotion, attitude, and character. 

“Spiritual practices,” Cowell says, “touch all of these parts. They affect the vagus nerve, which controls both breathing and stress response. They build character and invite deep emotional experience.”

“Spirituality is not simple to talk about,” Cowell says, “because in the English-speaking world, we’re used to thinking in terms of doctrines and creeds. But that’s not how spirituality and religion are understood globally. There are many religions, many creeds; all of them answer certain basic questions about our relationship to the universe, about how to live a meaningful and happy life, and about why certain things are right and wrong beyond the superficial level. 

“Saying ‘one set of ideas is right and others are wrong’ about spirituality doesn’t cut it anymore in a globalized world. From an early age, kids today can see that grown-ups don’t agree on the answers to these questions. And that leaves a lot of people in this place where they feel that these questions are too difficult to talk about with kids. How do you explain to kids why grown-ups disagree? Maybe these questions are too dangerous to talk about, because I don’t want to offend someone or say the wrong thing.’

“We can do better than that. Kids are going to have these questions. They’re going to feel a hole in what they’re being taught about themselves and about the world. A hole that every culture, globally and historically, has filled with some kind of teaching. We can’t avoid these topics. We can teach kids to think critically about them instead.” 

So what are parents and teachers to do if kids need teachings about a topic where grown-ups don’t agree on the answers?

“This is where spiritual education is needed to fill a gap in social-emotional learning,” Cowell says. “It’s not about having a corpus of facts and answers. It’s about teaching kids how to engage with these questions and their feelings around these questions. We can give them examples of answers from different cultures. In the process, kids get a feel for what is really nourishing and necessary to their own spirit; and we can show them that people of different religions are more the same than they are different. We can show them how to have respectful conversations around life’s biggest questions, even when they don’t agree on the answers.”

Cowell believes that Social-Emotional-Spiritual Education has a place supporting both secular and religious teachers. “If you’re a religious teacher in the 2020s,” she says, “you have to be prepared to answer the questions, ‘Why don’t grown-ups agree on this? What do other people think about it? Why should we believe what you’re teaching is important, if other people don’t even agree that it’s true?’ Kids are going to know people of other faith traditions, and non-religious people, and if you can’t answer those questions, you’re going to have a hard time reaching them.”

“If you’re a secular teacher, it’s the same kind of thing. You’ve got to be able to answer the question of, ‘Why don’t you ever talk about this topic that my mom says is really important? Why do my and my classmates’ parents disagree, when they both believe they have the right answer? What if I like a religious idea or practice, but my parents say it’s bad?’ These are questions that you’re going to get, and you need to be prepared to handle them in a way that doesn’t shut kids down when they ask spiritual questions.”

Spiritual Playdate’s library of conversations, activities, and games explores topics from fear, anger, and bullying to inclusive interfaith curricula about sacred spaces, sacred texts, faith, and connectedness. Cowell has facilitated children’s activities at numerous interfaith events in the American Midwest and at the Parliament of World Religions sessions in the US and Canada. She has also hosted monthly Zoom talks and meetings with experts in topics ranging from community-based approaches to violence prevention to interfaith parenting.

As a social mission enterprise, Spiritual Playdate offers its growing library of curricula at extremely low prices. Members will also have a chance to be part of the conversation about how to meet this complex and growing global need for Social-Emotional-Spiritual Education. The organization’s mission is to create a global peace education program, helping children to better understand themselves and their neighbors and preparing them to create a brighter future.

“It’s amazing the places people are finding to use these lessons,” Cowell tells me. “Families and neighborhood play groups use them. There’s a barber shop in Africa that has a subscription, and they teach kids in their town about these topics. There are yoga and martial arts studios with subscriptions. And of course there are the schools, churches, synagogues, mosques, and youth groups. We facilitated an activity about transforming anger into joy at Greater Chicagoland Pagan Pride last year, and everyone had a great time.”

Whether Spiritual Playdate is the solution for your educational needs, one thing seems certain: in an era of rapid globalization and explosive information, we owe our kids something better than avoidance when it comes to spiritual topics.