According to the CDC, social and emotional learning (SEL) teaches young people the skills to recognize and manage emotions, set and achieve positive goals, appreciate the perspectives of others, establish and maintain positive relationships, and make responsible decisions. It is associated with decreases in suicide ideation and attempts, as well as increases in social and emotional skills, attitudes, behaviors, and academic performance.

Ensuring students are connected to their schools and families is an important protective factor to reduce risk factors that can lead to poor mental health, substance misuse, violence, HIV, STDs, and unintended pregnancy.

Social and emotional learning can help students build relationships with parents, teachers, coaches, and staff.

https://www.cdc.gov/healthyyouth/stories/mh_orange-county.htm

SEL Benefits Children and Adolescents in:

For more than 40 years, YouthLight personnel have been developing, researching and providing innovative, interactive resources for promoting social emotional and other life-skills learning for children and adolescents. At first, most of our resources were developed for use by professional school counselors, social workers and other professional educators. Later, it became evident that many parents were finding our resources useful to use at home with their children.

YouthLight has amassed a library of more than 300 introductory, intermediate and advanced tools to help anyone working to promote SEL in young people. All our resources feature the evidence-based concepts and skills that have been proven to benefit young people and are each designed for specific age-levels of youth from 4 – 18 years old.

YouthLight Offers Much More than Other SEL Providers. While there is a growing number of SEL programs and lessons available to educators and parents, most are “introductory” level and do not provide the more intensive, advanced insights and skills needed by many young people to help them cope and thrive as they face the daily challenges in their worlds.

If you are already providing an SEL initiative with youth, consider extending your reach by selecting resources that provide insights and skills that will add more in-depth concepts and skills-practice in topics that can be tailored to the specific needs of your child (children). For example, one classroom might especially benefit with several more in-depth lessons on self-regulation. Another classroom might need more lessons on kindness and empathy. A third classroom might need more focus on anxiety and discouragement. The same is true for individual students. A one-size-fits-all SEL program should be considered as a mere introduction to these concepts and skills.

Look through the following list of topics in which we offer resources with a more introductory, intermediate or advanced SEL focus. Then consider choosing one or more of these tools to help you bolster your SEL initiatives.