Skill-Building for Lifelong Success

Emotional Intelligence for Early Childhood Education Starts with ECSEL

Emotional intelligence is the most sought-after skill for the modern workforce. 

It’s critical for lifelong learning, mental health, and well-being—and the foundation starts at birth.

A Gap in Early Childhood Programming

While behavior management tools are common, comprehensive mental health and emotional intelligence programs for early childhood classrooms are rare.

Skill-Building for Lifelong Success

Begin to ECSEL helps children of all backgrounds develop essential skills, including:

  • A positive sense of self
  • Emotional management
  • Empathy
  • Relationship-building
  • Decision-making

These skills set kids on equal footing and help close the achievement gap.

Teaching Self-Regulation in Real Time

Housman Institute offers early childhood mental health and behavior change solutions that work in the moment.

By using emotional situations as teaching opportunities, caregivers help children:

  • Build neural pathways for learning
  • Reduce stress and anxiety
  • Communicate effectively
  • Develop empathy and resilience

The Building Blocks of Emotional Intelligence

ECSEL equips teachers with tools they can use daily to help children regulate their emotions. Educators need this training to support students—and they also need strategies to manage their own emotions as key socializers and role models.

Neuroscience has shown the outcomes and benefits of developing the skills of emotional literacy and self-regulation. 

Children learn these skills in the context of relationships at school and at home, and they move far beyond typical notions of “social emotional learning.”

But standard educator training does not give teachers these skills–that’s where ECSEL comes in.

Children who have the tools of emotional intelligence can:

  • Self-regulate
  • Develop prosocial behaviors more quickly
  • Identify and support their own emotions and those of others
  • Develop critical thinking skills to problem solve and create a plan
  • Be empathetic and understanding of others

As children grow and learn into adulthood, they carry these skills forward to help them achieve:

  • Professional satisfaction and success
  • Healthier relationships
  • Empathy and understanding
  • Personal growth and satisfaction
  • Mental and physical well-being

See begin to ECSEL in action

We are raising the next generation at a time of extraordinary stress, anxiety, bullying, intolerance, and lack of empathy. Teachers and parents alike are struggling every day not only with the behavior, emotions, stress, dysregulation, and worries of the children they care for but also their own."

      ~ Dr. Donna Housman, Founder and CEO

Housman Institute has devoted over 30 years in research and practice building our evidence-based Emotional, Cognitive, and Social Early Learning (ECSEL) approach.

ECSEL uses "in the heat of the moment strategies" and age-appropriate developmental tools to promote emotional intelligence in children 0-8.

We also recognize that teachers often do not receive the needed training to support emotional intelligence in children and in themselves. It is our mission that all teachers have the tools and techniques not only to support their students’ emotional intelligence but also their own, in all contexts, all day and every day.

By reaching children in the earliest years, we have the opportunity to set our children up for success—and we move toward closing the achievement gap by giving ALL children the key tools for self-regulation needed for personal, academic, and career success.

Discover begin to ECSEL