An argument over a toy can bring a preschooler’s whole morning to a halt. What looks like a small disagreement to an adult can leave a child angry, upset, and unsure what to do next.

For parents and teachers, helping a child through moments like this can take as much patience as helping them learn letters and numbers.

Each time an adult helps a child pause, breathe, and put feelings into words, the child gets a chance to practice handling a difficult situation.

As children grow, the disagreements get more complicated, but understanding feelings and getting along with others remain part of everyday life.

A new study suggests that extra support with these skills in preschool may have benefits that last into adulthood.

Young adults who attended a preschool program combining these lessons with reading and language activities reported less loneliness, fewer symptoms of depression, and greater satisfaction with life.

Researchers had followed them for nearly two decades.

Making sense of feelings

The study involved 356 children, about four and a half years old, who came from low-income families and attended Head Start, a publicly funded preschool program.

Karen Bierman, a psychologist at Penn State, led the work and helped design an added program called REDI.

Her team randomly assigned 44 classrooms across three Pennsylvania counties to add REDI or continue their usual Head Start lessons.

“We wanted to understand whether providing students with social, problem-solving and language skills could set them on the path for lifelong success,” said Bierman.

Each week, teachers used stories, puppets, and role play in a 20-minute lesson about emotions, sharing, and disagreements.

One routine, called “doing turtle,” taught children to stop, take a deep breath, and then explain the problem and how they felt.

Teachers helped children practice those steps when disagreements actually happened, using posters and daily reminders.

They also read books on the same themes each day, while coaches visited weekly to support their teaching.

Feeling better years later

Researchers reached 263 of the original participants when they were 21 or 22 years old.

In phone interviews, the young adults answered questions about their health, relationships, behavior, and how they felt about their lives.

The REDI group did better in seven of the 11 areas the team examined. They reported less loneliness, fewer symptoms of depression, and fewer behavior problems, such as fighting or stealing.

They also reported greater empathy, or understanding and concern for other people’s feelings. They felt more supported by others and were more satisfied with their lives.

The differences were small to moderate. The groups did not clearly differ on the other four measures, including hyperactivity and feelings of belonging.

More healthy days, too

Feeling better can be difficult to capture in a single number, so one question offered a particularly practical way to understand the findings.

Researchers asked how many days in the past month poor physical or mental health had kept participants from their usual activities, such as working or taking care of themselves.

The REDI group averaged about 27.4 healthy days out of 30, compared with about 25.6 for their peers. That was almost two extra days when health problems did not get in the way of everyday life.

Study co-author Damon Jones, a research professor at Penn State’s Edna Bennett Pierce Prevention Research Center, noted that the monthly difference could add up to more than 20 healthy days a year.

“REDI improved lives in meaningful ways,” said Jones.

Some early gains lasted

By the end of preschool, children in REDI classrooms had gained more than children in regular classrooms in both early reading and social skills.

They knew more words and letters, understood emotions better, and were less aggressive.

The reading and language advantage faded within the first few years of elementary school.

The social and emotional gains didn’t, and an earlier follow-up of the same children found fewer behavior problems and less emotional distress among REDI participants in high school.

That follow-up also offered a clue to how the benefits lasted as the children moved on to new classrooms, teachers, and classmates. Part of the answer seemed to be relationships.

REDI children’s better understanding of emotions in preschool was linked to stronger relationships with classmates and teachers in elementary school.

Those relationships, in turn, were linked to fewer emotional and behavior problems in high school.

The researchers suggest that learning to handle feelings early may help children build relationships that keep supporting them as they grow.

Hardship still shaped lives

The researchers also looked at the difficult experiences children had faced before preschool.

Parents reported on nine kinds of hardship, including frequent spanking and moving home three or more times.

Nearly half the children had a parent with signs of depression, and nearly half had a parent who had been arrested.

Children who faced the most hardship reported worse adult outcomes on seven measures, whether or not they had attended REDI classrooms.

Even so, a difficult start did not appear to prevent children from benefiting, and REDI’s benefits for empathy and sociability were larger among those with more early hardship.

Study co-author Janet Welsh, a research professor at the Penn State center, emphasized the need to support children while protecting them from harm.

“We need to do everything we can to protect children from harm while also helping them build skills to handle whatever they experience in life,” said Welsh.

“This costs money, but it represents a solid investment in our collective future.”

What remains to learn

The adult findings came entirely from participants describing their own lives, so memory or a wish to present themselves favorably could have shaped their answers.

Researchers also could not reach everyone who started the study.

Those who stayed involved were more likely to be women and to have attended regular Head Start classrooms. Statistical adjustments may not fully account for that imbalance.

The findings also need testing in other communities to see whether children elsewhere benefit in similar ways.

Parents also reported hardships only before preschool, leaving later childhood experiences out of that part of the analysis.

REDI combined several kinds of support, and researchers still need to work out which parts mattered most, what they cost, and how well they work in other settings.

The study is published in the journal American Psychologist.

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