If you teach pre-K through third grade, you already know. You’ve felt it in the first weeks of school, in the circle time that won’t hold, in the transition that takes twice as long as it used to, in the child who melts down when the marker won’t cap. You don’t need a survey to tell you something has shifted in our youngest learners.
But now we have one.
In January, the EdWeek Research Center surveyed 1,163 early educators and administrators who work with children in pre-K through 3rd grade. The findings are stark. 72% of early educators report that their students struggle to follow instructions more so than their same-age peers two years ago. Teachers describe widening gaps in motor skills, attention, independence, and what the survey calls “social-emotional maturity” — the everyday abilities of following instructions, taking turns, and responding to disappointment without emotional outbursts.
The headlines frame this as a screen-time story. A parenting story. A post-pandemic story. And those frames are not wrong, exactly. But they are incomplete — and if we let them drive the response, we will spend the next decade chasing symptoms.
Here is what I want every early childhood educator and administrator to hear: what you are witnessing is not, at its core, a behavior problem. It is an emotion problem. And until we name it correctly, we cannot solve it.
The skill underneath the skill
Consider what it actually takes for a four-year-old to follow a simple direction — please put your coat in your cubby and come to the rug.
She has to notice her own internal state (excitement, frustration, fatigue). She has to tolerate the interruption of whatever she was just doing. She has to hold two steps in working memory while her body moves. She has to manage the disappointment of leaving the block she was about to place. And she has to do all of that while regulating the social pull of twelve other children doing twelve other things.
Every one of those is an emotional regulation skill. Following a direction is not a compliance task. It is, at its foundation, a feelings task. A child who cannot yet notice, name, and manage what is happening inside her body cannot reliably do what we are asking — no matter how clearly we say it, how many visuals we post, or how many consequences we attach.
This is the through-line the EdWeek survey points to again and again. The decline in “social-emotional maturity.” The loss of “independence.” The struggle with “attention.” These are not separate deficits. They are the surface expressions of an underdeveloped emotional foundation.
Why the foundation has eroded
Emotion regulation is built in the first five years through thousands of small interactions with attuned adults — what researchers call co-regulation. A caregiver notices a child’s rising frustration and helps her name it, tolerate it, and move through it. Over time, with enough repetitions, the child internalizes the process and begins to do it herself. That internalization is what we later call self-control, grit, executive function, and school readiness.
When those repetitions are replaced by a tablet at the grocery store, a phone at the dinner table, a screen at bedtime, the co-regulation circuit does not get built. And the child arrives at your classroom door, missing not a behavior, but a developmental foundation.
The shift we need: from repair to prevention
For thirty-five years, my work has been grounded in one belief: it is far easier to prevent than repair.
We are currently spending enormous resources on the repair side of that equation — on intervention teams, behavior plans, therapeutic classrooms, and the quiet attrition of teachers who cannot sustain the daily toll. Every one of those is necessary. None of them is upstream enough.
Upstream is the emotional intelligence (EI) of the adults in the room, and the explicit, daily, developmentally-attuned building of social-emotional maturity in the children in front of them. Upstream is a pre-K teacher who can name her own frustration in real time so her classroom does not absorb it. Upstream is a kindergarten teacher who treats a tantrum as information, not defiance. Upstream is a three-year-old learning, through a hundred tiny moments, that big feelings are survivable and nameable and shared.
This is what the Emotional, Cognitive, and Social Early Learning (ECSEL) approach is designed to build. Not a curriculum layered on top of an already-packed day, but a way of being in relationship with young children that rebuilds the foundation the survey is telling us has eroded.
The support educators need — and how begin to ECSEL delivers it
Naming the problem is only the first step. Educators cannot meet children’s emotional needs on instinct and goodwill alone — not when the developmental gap is this wide, and not when classrooms are this full. Teachers need real tools, real training, and a framework that builds their own emotional intelligence alongside the children’s. Without that, even the most dedicated educator burns out trying to repair what was never meant to be repaired in the classroom.
This is exactly what begin to ECSEL®, our flagship teacher training program, was built to provide. Grounded in 35+ years of research and developed through partnerships with early childhood programs across the country, begin to ECSEL equips educators with three things the field is urgently missing:
- A framework for the adult first. Children cannot regulate beyond the level their teacher can. Begin to ECSEL begins by building educators’ own emotional intelligence — their ability to notice, name, and manage their internal states — so they can offer the co-regulation young children require.
- A daily practice, not a separate subject. The training gives educators concrete, developmentally attuned moves they can use during transitions, tantrums, rug time, and the lunch line — the real moments when emotional learning actually happens. It is woven into the day, not added to it.
- A research base that holds up. Peer-reviewed evidence shows that children in ECSEL classrooms demonstrate stronger emotional regulation, richer emotional vocabulary, and the foundational capacities that the EdWeek survey tells us are fading. Prevention, measured.
For administrators asking what to do about the 72%, begin to ECSEL is the upstream answer. It is what allows educators to stop chasing behavior and start building the foundation beneath it — with the tools, language, and support they have needed all along.
What to do on Monday morning
If you are an educator or an administrator reading this survey and feeling the weight of it, I want to offer three reframes you can carry into the week:
Read behavior as communication about emotion. When a child disrupts, ask first: what feeling is underneath this, and does this child have the skill to manage it? Nine times out of ten, the answer will redirect your response.
Resist the urge to tighten. The instinct in a dysregulated classroom is more control, more structure, more consequences. The evidence says the opposite works better: more connection, more naming of feelings, more predictable co-regulation from the adult.
Invest in the adult first. Children cannot regulate beyond the level their teacher can. Before you buy another program, ask what you are doing to build the emotional intelligence of the educators you already have.
The 72% number is not a verdict on this generation of children. It is a signal that the developmental inputs have changed, and our response has to change with them. We can keep treating the symptoms. Or we can do the harder, better, more durable work of prevention.
I know which one our children deserve.
Every child deserves the emotional foundation to thrive — to become their best self, in learning and in life.
———
Dr. Donna Housman is a clinical psychologist, creator of the ECSEL approach, and founder of Housman Learning. Learn more about begin to ECSEL teacher training for your program or district.
