With COVID-19, It's Urgent - and Wonderful - to
Equip Kids With the Life Skills for Happy,
Healthy and Harmonious Lives
A gigantic path to successful lives, these skills reduce parent and child stress and make students far safer...
...from anxiety, depression, bullying, racial conflict, violence, drugs, suicides, and screen addiction.
And Happiness CAN Be Taught!
Emotional Intelligence: The Greatest Lesson in the World...and the Single Most Important for Our Children's Future
And for humanity’s future. That’s because Emotional Intelligence is the crucial ability to deal with ourselves, our relationship with others, and our lives in a healthy, caring and productive way. It’s an antidote to the mental health crisis caused by Covid-19 – also to racial prejudice. Other long-lasting benefits that derive from kids learning EQ skills are:
- EQ (as in IQ) life skills can dissolve, in children and adults, their alienation, inability to process anger, emotional suffering, violence, abusiveness, low self-esteem – and blocks to learning. Conflict, pain, disrespect and prejudices can dominate with lack of these skills.
- Nothing in the human toolbox has been proven to uplift children, schools and youth mental health better. Every child is disadvantaged and less effective without these skills.
- Research shows EQ is more relevant than IQ to personal success, health and happiness – and to positive outcomes for communities and workplaces.
- 10% of schools soar with this life-transforming learning educators call “social-emotional learning” – and 100% of our kids deserve to, as do our societies.
Parents, kids, teachers, administrators – everyone, really – can take easy steps to lift up every kid in home and school. The gigantic outcome will be gifting our children the skills that produce confident, successful, emotionally healthy young years and lives – and then a world we’d love to see for them and for ourselves.
21 Videos About Racial Prejudice to Share With Kids
Making Possible Generations of Kids Who Can Deal
With What the Real World Throws at Them
Happiness starts here: If you find life hard to deal with, in the COVID-19 era it’s even more challenging for kids and families without the life skills to manage the world around them and their emotional reactions to it. EQ was formerly just a cool concept for personal achievement. EQ learning is now an essential life skill at a time the Census Bureau reports that 34% of Americans show signs of clinical anxiety or depression, and the country confronts racism and inequity.
Among many benefits, just the abilities to manage emotions and stress and empathize with others helps kids make far better choices and eases mental distress. EQ has a powerful ripple effect – from classroom and (ideally) home to society, and into a child’s future. Life’s a lot better for everyone when kids learn to take on challenges, overcome obstacles, bounce back, and learn from mistakes – and have happy, healthy and harmonious relationships and lives.
WHY: So that you, parents, businesses and the general public, finally become aware of and mobilized behind the most important education and social movement in the world – and the one yours and all children, and humanity, most needs for its clear benefits and possibly survival. We invite you to learn what educators have created beneficial to all of us – and then engage. Click here and also view our messenger ambassador opportunity.
WHO: We are a national project of nonprofit/nonpartisan Earthways Foundation. The EQuip Our Kids! Campaign was founded by business leaders whose philanthropy has been to help under-served youth. EQuip Our Kids! is a branding name for the youth and school aspect of our work as a pro-bono marketing, strategy and organizational development ally to a movement founded and led by educators and child-development experts. Separately, we support adoption of EQ learning and hiring in workplaces.
Dissolving racial and emotional barriers
to healthy relationships
Our movement is a rare reason for optimism that something hugely good is possible on a mass scale, with tremendous positive outcomes for children, families, communities and global society.
PROMINENT SUPPORTERS OF EQ LEARNING FOR CHILDREN
Among those who encourage such learning without endorsing our specific effort: Former First Ladies Michelle Obama and Laura Bush, Lady Gaga, film director George Lucas, relationship expert John Gray, New Hampshire Republican Governor Chris Sununu, and Children’s Defense Fund founder Marian Wright Edelman. Former HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros is an EQuip Our Kids! endorser.
Michelle Obama / Laura Bush / George Lucas / Lady Gaga / Henry Cisneros
SOME PROMINENT BUSINESS AND INSTITUTIONAL SUPPORTERS
Google, the LA Lakers (an EQuip Our Kids! endorser), the U.S. Air Force, Pepsico, American Express, Panda Express, Allstate Insurance, Forbes Magazine, Harvard Business Review.
“I am happy to endorse the campaign because this is something we’ve needed for a long time.“
–Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti • Other Endorsements
EQ in Schools? It's a Game-Changer!
Watch How Happiness Grows!
When children develop emotional intelligence (EQ) they problem solve and help each other.
They reinforce each other’s learning and relate to other people with understanding and empathy.
They resolve conflicts, and establish and maintain positive relationships and high academic results.
And they are much happier!
Up to 90% Positive Changes for
Schools and Children
Grades soar
Attendance climbs
Happy students love school
Mentally and emotional healthy students go on to lead
high-achievement lives
Violence, self-harming and bullying dissipate
Drug use plummets
Race and class biases decline
Dropout rates decrease
Screen Addiction abates
Happiness Can Be Taught
Educators call EQ training programs and practices Social-Emotional Learning. Comprehensively employed, these skills can improve the school performance, lives and success into adulthood of every child (see evidence), and the quality of our relationships, workplaces and society. Research shows that early such learning is remarkably beneficial – a major reason to create many more EQ-inclusive public and private pre-schools.
“These are life skills any parent would want for a child. I think everyone should care about this, not just parents. I want this for my community.”
–Daniel Goleman, popularizer and best-selling author of “Emotional Intelligence.”
“There are specific interventions and promising practices that work. These programs nurture a child’s social and emotional health and their academic skills.”
–Former First Lady Laura Bush
What Students Learn - and We Need More Of
The key components taught in schools are awareness and self-control of our hugely important emotional lives and resulting behaviors. This is accompanied by real world relationship, collaboration and conflict resolution skills that lead to respect for – and the ability to understand and empathize with – others. Add to these social skills: responsible decision making and effective problem solving.
Most students now are taught the bare-bones skills to get a job, but not the skills they need to truly and confidently succeed. Let’s change that.
Schools can tap many evidence-proven learnings and practices that,
comprehensively applied, can change a child or youth for the better.
In sum, students attain high EQ and a healthy capacity
to make the most of life – and often, increases in IQ.
Why EQuipped Kids Are Universally So Important...
Because they’ll create an emotionally saner and relationally healthier world… and enjoy happier, more successful lives.
Decades of research show that prioritizing emotional and social intelligence skills in Pre-K-12 schools
has a profound effect in later reducing societal ills, conflict, crime and personal distress! It also:
+ Dramatically increases core test scores (by 11 points or 20%), and graduation and college attendance rates.
Note that the U.S. now ranks low in math, reading and science proficiency among advanced nations.
Read More!
+ Reverses by up to 90% the mind-boggling U.S. rates of classroom disturbances, bullying, violence, drug usage and dropouts, and produces remarkable young people who largely get to be their happy, caring best selves.
We need to create a better future for our schools and children
– and for humanity itself.
The most important lesson of all is learning to how to emotionally deal
with ourselves, with others, and all the problems life throws at us.
EQuip Our Kids! is a nonprofit campaign to mobilize parents, businesses and the public to join a cause now supported by many thousands of educators. We welcome your participation and encourage your donations. View what they pay for.
We also call on businesses, organizations and institutions to co-promote EQuip Our Kids! as both a national and global cause – which is possible at little or no additional cost. (View just how here .)
We’re glad to make the case that getting behind this movement will positively affect a tremendous number of other causes that engage your care and attention. What’s more, if you are in a position to hire for EQ-proficient employees, it will lead to a happier, more creative and more productive workforce. Contact us for more information.
Become a Social-Media Ambassador
This is a great cause and if you’re inspired to advance the EQ Revolution, one easy way is to share these visuals and others on this site on your social media and via email, with a link to EQuipOurKIds.org. Also follow and share our social media (links at bottom of page). We also encourage message creativity. If your self-created messages draw attention, please share them with us so we can post – or just email us the ideas to EQuipAllKids@gmail.com. We seek ambassadors who can reach segments of the population with which you are familiar.
Learn about other actions you can take here.
About Big EQ
Mission Big Picture
The Big EQ Campaign was founded to undertake a pro bono campaign to popularize the wonderful benefits to everyone of – and need for – universal emotional intelligence (EQ) training. An equal commitment is providing development and outreach guidance to existing and new organizations whose mission is advancing what educators call EQ-raising “social-emotional learning” (SEL) curriculum into all schools and practices in homes.
SEL elevates children’s prospects and U.S. schools’ performance dramatically, which will help elevate overall American EQ and societal health.
The Big EQ is an independent nonprofit project of Earthways Foundation with no remunerative goal or motive other than the success of our mission. It was founded by a group of business leaders involved for years as social activists in youth development projects. We are guided by some of the country’s highly knowledgeable leaders in the fields of social-emotional learning and youth development.
EQuip Our Kids! is our branding name for the campaign. In the absence of public knowledge of SEL’s extraordinary benefits, and therefore parent and public support, comprehensive, well-integrated, evidence-based SEL programs, practices and policies have been adopted by only a small percentage of American schools.
This is so even though SEL is likely the best and cheapest overall tool for education progress. At the same time it transforms the fundamental ways of thinking and being that lead to many long-term mental and physical problems, social injustice, structural poverty, racial and class bias, crime, violence and other anti-social and unloving behaviors.
In fact, we are happy to make the case that no mission out there is more important to the long-term public good than elevating the human capacity to deal in a healthy way with ourselves and others. No facet of human life, no challenges we face, will go untouched by such progress.
An EQ and Social Skills Program for Every Need
There are dozens of companies and institutions offering to schools evidence-based programs designed to advance social and emotional learning. There are hundreds of other non-tested programs offered to schools and parents that range from comprehensive skills training, to helpful if partial after-school training, to online interactions to meditation.
Primarily created by child-development experts, educators, and university-based academics, these programs offer a range of materials and curricula to suit many different school contexts. Overall, they seek to catalyze a universe of schools that are supportive, joyful learning environments dedicated to helping what educators call “the whole child” to succeed.
Explaining EQ: The Neuroscience Case
Research in neuroscience has proven that the brain has “plasticity,” meaning it can grow new synapses through repetition. Research has also identified that different areas of the brain control various functions. As a crucial example, severe negative emotional reactions are located and stimulated in one part of the brain while patience, elevated comprehension, empathy and understanding are functions of other areas of the brain.
The Many Ways You Can Help
Parents certainly and almost everyone else can play a role in bringing Social and Emotional Learning into all schools – and therefore over time bring the benefits and awareness into adult daily life.
If ever a good cause deserved massive public support, comprehensive, properly implemented emotional and social intelligence learning in all schools curriculum would be a candidate. Its dual upsides – the wonderful immediate one for schools and kids and the spin-off positive societal upgrade – are unmatchable, with virtually no downside when fully implemented.
Find an easy way to help move this lovely transformation along from its existing low adoption rate (and low EQ) to emotional and social intelligence splendor everywhere (and high EQ).
Allies and Endorsers
The Big EQ Campaign, while being a fully independent non-profit organization, has been cultivating collaboration with and allies from the broader education, business and civic communities. We seek mutually supportive alliances with parent organizations, with business associations and individual businesses, with national and community organizations concerned with healthy child and economic development, and with public figures and influencers. We also have launched an Endorsers campaign.