Fighting Bullying with the RULER Approach

Marc Brackett, director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, on the state of bullying in schools, the RULER approach and helping teachers develop emotional intelligence.

Transcript

THE STATE OF BULLYING IN SCHOOLS

Marc Brackett: Well, what we know from research is that about a third of all children are bullied in our nation’s schools, and that’s a lot, you know, one-third of all children, and it goes from 20% to 70% depending on the circumstances and the environment. The challenge with bullying is that about 70% goes undetected by the adults in the environment. These kids are very good, you know, at hiding and doing things secretly. Still, it took a tremendous amount of kids that are being bullied. Now I think it’s even different because of technology, meaning that, you know, when kids are making fun of me on the bus or in the playground, that’s one thing, very painful. Now, when you’re being bullied, and someone puts something on Instagram or whatever social media platform it is, all of a sudden, the entire school knows about it, so it’s a different space as well.

Unfortunately, schools like quick fixes, right? So they buy programs for bullying prevention that create rules for the environment, but rules are never going to change the way people believe, right? They’re not going to help shift the cultural climate in an organization, they’re not going to teach people skills, so, really, that’s my whole career. It has been thinking through what the schools need to do to support healthy children’s development, meaning what do the adults need to know? What do they need to be able to do to support children’s healthy development? And then what do we have to teach children in order to prevent these problems in the first place?

THE RULER APPROACH

Marc Brackett: It’s a complex model, it means you have to start as early as possible, and you have to keep going because life changes and children’s development changes over time. There are four kinds of pieces to RULER, which is the name of the approach that we’ve built upon for the last 20 years. The first is mindsets, right? Do people believe that how children feel matters? And the truth is not everybody really cares about how kids feel. Because adults are raising kids, right? Children have the fundamental right to be safe, in school, and with a home. That’s their right for being alive in this world. Interestingly enough, if you look at data people were performing surgery on children without giving them anesthesia until the middle of the last century. Their pain systems weren’t as developed as adults’, which is obviously crazy. So, we have to shift our belief systems about children and about ourselves too. How I feel matters, you know?

I’m a guy. I’m not a tough guy like my father wanted me to be, but when I speak about my childhood oftentimes, in my pain, in my bullying, I have males who say to me things like “I would never even tell my own child that I had bullying like you had because my child would think I am weak.” So, you see, that’s a belief system, that means that feeling fear or anxiety or shame makes you lesser than, and so we have to eradicate that belief system because it’s just not true for human beings who experience emotion, all emotions matte. And if we have beliefs that, you know, “men can’t feel fear or shame or anxiety, only anger.” We’re not going to have a healthy society nor parents who are able to raise children who are healthy.

The second is that we have to develop the skills, so we’ve created an acronym that we use, called RULER, which stands for the skills of emotional intelligence, the first is recognizing emotions. So, we’re in this interview right now, looking at your facial expression, your body language, and listen to your tone of voice, and I’m trying to make meaning out of it, right? Are you interested in what I’m saying? Are you judging what I’m saying? You know, are we having a good time, a bad time? That’s part of life, right? You’re doing it all the time. You’re making meaning out of your interactions, and do we teach people how to do that accurately? Are we self-aware? Like, how am I feeling right now? Am I anxious? Am I comfortable? Am I overwhelmed? Am I apprehensive? What is the feeling that I’m having right now? Do I know why I’m having those feelings? Do I know why you’re having those feelings? Do I understand feelings?

So what I find in my research is that people are not very skilled at even labeling their feelings, so they can’t tell the difference between anger and disappointment, for example. Again, what we find is that people have not been taught this, they really haven’t been taught to differentiate, you know, disappointment from anger or anxiety from fear, and what we say is that you have to name it to tame it, right? You have to label it because by labeling your feelings, right, it gives you access to a way of thinking about it that will help you regulate it effectively.

So, we got into the R, the U, and the L of emotional intelligence. The last two are expressing and regulating emotions. So what research shows is that when schools do this work with quality and high-implementation fidelity, meaning they really do it, we see shifts in students’ academics, we see decreases in student anxiety and depression, increases in their leadership skills. For teachers, we show that there is less burnout and greater job satisfaction. For schools, we see just the environment feels more positive, and there’s less bullying. So, pretty good outcomes that we’ve seen thus far as we continue to evaluate RULER in different schools.

HELPING TEACHERS DEVELOP EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE

Marc Brackett: What our research is showing, which is interesting, which is also aligned with our model, is that by focusing on adults first, right, you get the greatest impact. That you’re one doing RULER is not teaching a curricular in the classroom, it’s the school thinking about how do we support the adults who are about to teach these skills to kids to be those role models. So we spend the first year on adult development. We move to child development, and what we’re showing in our researches that actually, the first year we find teachers are less stressed, a little bit happier, and in the second year, we find that that impacts the students. So, just as we would expect that helping teachers develop their emotional intelligence helps themselves, but also helps them help kids.

EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE AT HOME

Marc Brackett: I think for families, the first step is, be a role model as a parent. So, test your own emotional vocabulary, do you know the difference between anger and discipline as a parent? Are you comfortable expressing all emotions as a parent? Are you modeling effective emotion management for your child? Are you using healthy strategies to regulate your own feelings? That’s the question that I think parents have to ask themselves, am I being a role model for my child?

The second is that we have to acknowledge that our children’s emotions are important, and we’re not going to be judges of those feelings, we’re going to be scientists for our
kids instead of judges. So, I talk a lot about this in my book that there are parents and people who are emotion scientists versus those who are emotion judges, right? The scientists open to emotions as curious, ask good questions, the judge is the teller of someone how they’re feeling, right? They don’t really care about feelings, they just say everything is good or bad when they don’t regulate well they just say “this is who I am, get over it”, whereas the emotion scientist says “I didn’t do such a good job today, I need to ask better questions, I need to use better strategies.”

So first is to be the role model, second is to become a scientist, not a judge, and the third is, you have to work with your child to help them a) understand their feelings, and then regulate them effectively.

ARE SCHOOLS TEACHING EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE?

Marc Brackett: Well, I think it’s important to distinguish like clinical therapy from developing emotional intelligence, right? Because a lot of people think this is clinical work and it’s not, it’s life’s work. As you try to achieve your goals in life, you get frustrated, you get overwhelmed, you get tired, you get anxious. You’re in a relationship, things go well somedays, things don’t go well other days, that’s life, you don’t need, I hope, it’s ok, you just need to learn the skills to deal with life, and we’re not teaching that right now in schools. We don’t really provide an emotional education, right? We provide math, science, literature, social studies, and the truth is they’re not learned through, they’re learned informally. Unfortunately, many people are not good at it, so we learn informally, had you do the bad things.

I mean, let’s face it, you know, my mother, God bless her, she was a lovely woman, and she meant well, but she did not know how to deal with her emotions, you know? She was very anxious. I remember when I was being bullied, she would say things like, “Oh my goodness, honey, I can’t believe you’re being bullied! Don’t tell me everything, I’ll have a breakdown!”, and I would be saying things like “well, I’m having the breakdown!” Then my father, who was, you know, a very tough guy, he’d say “son, you have to toughen up,” that’s not teaching skills, right? That is telling a kid who’s not a tough guy, who might not ever be a tough guy, not to talk about your feelings.

REDEFINING PERSONAL SUCCESS

Marc Brackett: So, I think we have to broaden our definition of what it means to be a successful individual, to be a good decision-maker, to have positive relationships, to having well-being, and when we do that, then, maybe, what we do downstream, right? In our education system, will change and hopefully that will: a) decrease the amount of stress and anxiety in our nation, and b) help all the students develop the skills they need to get through life.

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