Why Marc Brackett wants schools to teach children what to do with their feelings

The Yale emotional-intelligence expert argues that naming feelings is only the first step: children and adults also need to learn how to respond, recover and repair.

Marc Brackett has built a career around a simple but stubborn idea: emotions shape how people learn, work and relate to one another, yet schools and homes still spend far more time on content than on coping. In his new book, Dealing with Feeling: Use Your Emotions to Create the Life You Want, the founding director of the Yale Centre for Emotional Intelligence argues that many adults were never taught how to handle anger, anxiety, disappointment or shame, and that children are still being asked to navigate those feelings without much guidance. His earlier book, Permission to Feel, focused on recognising emotions; this one turns to the harder question of what comes next. According to Brackett’s own account, and to the Yale Centre’s description of his work, his approach is rooted in research-based social and emotional learning, including the RULER programme used in schools.

The book’s appeal lies partly in its honesty. Brackett does not present himself as someone who has mastered emotional discipline. He writes candidly about losing his temper during lockdown and then repairing the damage the next morning, a reminder that emotional intelligence is not about perfect behaviour but about recovery, responsibility and self-correction. That modest tone gives the book warmth, but it also reinforces his larger argument: people do not choose every feeling that arrives, yet they can learn to respond more skilfully. The result is less a self-help manifesto than a practical case for emotional training as a life skill.

One of the book’s strongest sections returns to a principle Brackett has long championed: people need precise language for what they feel if they are going to manage it well. His Mood Meter, a tool developed through the Yale Centre for Emotional Intelligence, is designed to help users identify emotions by levels of pleasantness and energy, rather than lumping everything together as stress or bad mood. That emphasis matches research in social and emotional learning. A study indexed by PubMed on the RULER approach says emotion-regulation skills are important for school readiness and academic achievement, while Brackett’s own SEL guide presents the Mood Meter as a classroom tool for helping students recognise, label and regulate feelings. In practice, the lesson is straightforward: naming emotions accurately often makes them more manageable.

Brackett is also careful to complicate the familiar advice to “calm down”. He argues that regulation is not only about soothing arousal, but about knowing when a quieting strategy helps and when it blunts the useful discomfort that prompts repair. That distinction matters for parents and educators, who may be tempted to treat every emotional spike as something to flatten immediately. In the book, and in Yale Medicine’s discussion of his work, emotional intelligence is presented as a teachable set of habits that supports learning, relationships and well-being, not as a decorative extra. The broader point is that children do better when adults help them understand feelings, not merely suppress them.

For teachers and parents, that makes the book especially useful. Brackett’s examples are concrete, classroom-friendly and easy to translate into family life, whether through a brief check-in, a shared vocabulary for moods or a better response after conflict. The approach has already spread well beyond Yale: the centre says RULER is used in more than 2,500 schools worldwide, and districts such as Westport Public Schools have adopted it as part of their social and emotional learning work. That reach helps explain why Dealing with Feeling reads less like a theory book than a manual for ordinary life. Its lasting message is not that emotions can be eliminated, but that they can be understood, named and used well enough to improve how people live together.