A Little HOPE Can Give Children a Happier Future

Why HOPE Fills a Skills Gap

Ananthakrishnan: “In school, you learn technical skills like math and reading. Sometimes, it felt that we didn’t learn the skills needed to deal with emotions like anger and frustration—and this is compounded in lower socioeconomic areas where there’s not enough resources to deal with adverse events.

As an intern, my idea was to create educational material for elementary teachers that incorporate positive childhood experience into day-to-day experiences: What is emotional regulation and dysregulation? How are positive childhood experiences and adverse childhood experiences influenced?

Let’s say you have a kid who’s always a little angry. You’d put him in a timeout. But that doesn’t solve the problem. It makes it worse; it’s a negative cycle. How can you incorporate positive childhood experiences to combat that?

We created two versions of “10 Ways to Calm Down.” Mine was geared toward little kids; my partner created an educational pamphlet for teachers and caregivers. It’s colorful, with an approachable font. It describes how to identify emotional dysregulation, emotional regulation, and co-regulation, where an adult or peers help the child regain control. Just like they’re learning so many other skills in school, hopefully this will also help them learn how to control and use emotions positively instead of just acting on them.

I centered my strategies around three categories—Before the Moment (of being emotionally overwhelmed), During the Moment, and After the Moment—with different strategies that educators can use, including a daily feelings check-in with rose, bud, or thorn to get insight into the emotional state of the kids; creating calming spaces; and helping to make alternative positive choices the next time they’re upset. The goal was to create something at a teacher’s fingertips when they’re in the classroom, when things are busy.”

McHugh: “At HOPE, I was specifically focusing on civic and social engagement, combing through research databases to find papers that support the claim that experiences in childhood lead to measurable physical and mental health outcomes in adulthood. I had a formal literature review of 100 or more articles to support their mission — showing that HOPE has measurable outcomes. It’s not just an idea.”

Weisburst: “I liked seeing how much like action HOPE was taking. HOPE is a research lab, but they’re also employing their framework. While I was there, HOPE was in the process of having the primary care pediatrics office at Tufts Medical Center become a HOPE-informed clinic. Dr. Burstein and Dr. Sege set up a shadowing opportunity for me with one of the pediatricians there, so I was able to watch him using the HOPE framework in his interviews with patients, explaining it to me along the way.

It was cool to see this implemented so easily. If the HOPE framework were taught as part of medical training, these strategies could be used as a natural part of interviewing a patient and doing a regular assessment. I took a lot of inspiration from that shadowing visit.”