The Myth of the Emotional Toolkit

Why wellbeing interventions miss the point and what children really need for emotional growth

I regularly speak with parents who are simply trying to prepare their children for a world that can be overwhelming, confusing, and, at times, frightening. They're doing their best to equip them with every possible skill — from mindfulness to assertiveness — often in an effort to manage their own anxieties or to protect their children from the struggles they themselves once faced. And this impulse is understandable.

While I absolutely support the idea that children should learn about emotional health alongside physical health, resilience as well as mathematics, and social skills alongside academic or career skills, I often encourage parents to return to the fundamentals of raising children, human relationships, and wellbeing. These basics often prove more powerful than any shiny new wellbeing intervention.

By Johan Christian Dahl, Courtesy of National Gallery of Art

Some of the manualised therapeutic approaches that took off in the 1970s, alongside the rise of positive psychology in the 1990s, has created a hype of a tool-oriented mindset around emotional wellbeing.

The prevailing message is clear: to live well, manage anxiety, avoid toxic relationships, and recover from difficult experiences, you need strategies. The more techniques you acquire, the better off you’ll be. This logic has been enthusiastically embraced by advice columns, wellbeing workshops, social media feeds, and corporate wellbeing programmes alike.

Unfortunately, children have inherited the unintended side effects of this trend. A widely held belief suggests that if we equip young people with coping tools early enough, we can somehow future-proof them against the hardships of being human. Teach them some breathing techniques, a bit of gratitude, and how to label their emotions, and they’ll be protected from life’s rougher edges.

Schools, in particular, have been quick to adopt interventions supported by a single promising study, especially when such research links two appealing outcomes: gratitude with happiness, mindfulness with improved mental health, and so on. That’s often enough to convince policymakers, educators, and parents that these tools should be part of every child’s psychological toolkit.

My discomfort with this approach might seem unexpected. After all, I’m a mental health professional and a researcher who has explored these ideas firsthand. But it’s not that tools are inherently problematic. Life is hard, and not everyone is naturally equipped to manage stress, empathise, or regulate emotions with ease. The issue lies in how many of these so-called “tools” are more the product of marketing than of meaningful psychological growth and change. Even more troubling is how these practices are often stripped of context: removed from the realities of human behaviour and the social environments we inhabit and repackaged into compulsory modules.

Consider a study published a few years ago that raised serious concerns about school-based wellbeing programmes despite their admirable intentions—and even sparked a bit of a backlash from journalists and commentators at the time. The study, one of the largest and most costly of its kind, involved over 8,000 children aged 11 to 14 across 84 schools. It tested the impact of a programme based on Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), including modules on mindfulness, emotion regulation, and distress tolerance.

The results were disappointing. Not only did this intervention fail to improve students' mental health, but in some cases, it made things worse. Kids reported more anxiety, more depressive symptoms, poorer relationships with their parents, and lower emotional awareness and regulation, both immediately after the programme and again six months later.

This was especially uncomfortable in light of previous claims made by Willem Kuyken, study’s lead researcher, who said: “Just as brushing your teeth or going for a run are well-known ways of protecting general physical health, mindfulness exercises develop mental fitness and resilience.” The reality turned out to be more complicated.

To be fair, this doesn’t suggest that teaching emotional skills to young people is inherently misguided. Rather, it highlights the need for more rigorous scrutiny of what is being promoted as “essential.” Because sometimes, even well-meaning interventions can do more harm than good.

And this is the purpose of science: to challenge our assumptions. The issue is how quickly we transform promising ideas into orthodoxy, deploying them in schools, clinics, and workplaces as though they’re universally effective. This speaks to a deeper problem in how we approach mental health: a persistent belief that psychological change can be delivered through tools, techniques, and neatly packaged interventions.

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So why did this particular intervention backfire?

At its core, the problem is that children aren’t passive recipients of techniques. They live in families, classrooms, and communities. Most classrooms are not emotionally safe spaces where young people can meaningfully reflect on life’s challenges. And without addressing family dynamics or the broader context in which children live, it’s difficult to foster real, lasting change.

The study also revealed that children who were already experiencing poorer mental health were especially vulnerable to negative outcomes. While screening for such differences brings its own challenges, we cannot overlook the fact that interventions affect individuals differently. Not every child needs—or benefits from—structured emotional skills training. In fact, another study of a separate online school-based programme found that while some students appreciated it, others found it irrelevant or distressing. For certain students, modules focusing on negative thought patterns actually intensified their distress. This reinforces a key point: timing, context, and readiness matter.

There’s no shortage of evidence illustrating the limitations of these initiatives. A 2018 systematic review of school-based mental health interventions in the UK, led by Mackenzie and Williams, concluded that such programmes had, at best, small to neutral effects on promoting mental wellbeing or preventing mental health difficulties. Similar results have emerged across multiple meta-analyses, such as this one.

Perhaps instead of rushing to hand children (or adults, for that matter) a checklist of coping strategies, we should pause to consider the foundational elements of human wellbeing and growth.

Let me illustrate this with an analogy from psychotherapy.

Many people assume that therapy is where you go to learn “tools.” That therapists function like coaches or workshop leaders who teach you clever strategies to manage stress, set boundaries, or stop overthinking. It’s a widespread belief, but a mistaken one.

Not entirely wrong, of course. Many therapists do offer those kinds of techniques. In fact, modern therapy often resembles psycho-education or instruction, largely due to the influence of evidence-based approaches. But here’s the myth: meaningful psychotherapy isn’t grounded in tools and techniques. It’s rooted in relationship. In what unfolds in the room between two people. The therapeutic effect comes from presence, from navigating tension, from tolerating discomfort, and from engaging with the painful parts of the self. That’s where genuine transformation occurs—not through clever strategies, but through the experience of a different kind of relationship. I’ve written extensively about this before while discussing why people are losing trust in psychotherapy, and whether AI could ever replace it.

Apply this analogy to children’s emotional development — resilience, emotional fitness, wellbeing — and the importance of a relational approach becomes clear. It matters far more than any compulsory intervention, especially when individual differences and context are ignored. What really shapes growth is the fabric of daily interactions. The work happens through lived experience, especially in relationships. And psychological development can’t be reduced to a worksheet, an app, or a five-step formula.

Take these examples. A young girl watches her father admit to feeling anxious before a big presentation. He explains how he’s managing it and why he’s doing it anyway. In that moment, she learns to name her own nerves before a test, and sees what it means to face difficult feelings with honesty and intention. Or a teacher shares a story about messing up in school and feeling embarrassed. The class laughs, and later a shy student finds it easier to admit a mistake, having seen that adults aren’t perfect either.

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The most powerful learning doesn’t come from being told what to do with difficult feelings. It’s shaped by experience. By watching the adults around them manage stress, repair after conflict, and remain present through discomfort, children learn what it means to regulate, relate, and recover. Presence, honesty, flexibility, and emotional steadiness matter far more than scripted tools or programmes.

This isn’t a call for flawless parenting or teaching. No one needs to be endlessly patient or calm. Nor is it about placing the burden solely on families or teachers. What children need are the essentials: love that’s expressed, enough consistency to feel secure, and emotionally available adults who offer warmth and support, alongside structure and challenge.

Because the work of wellbeing doesn’t sit in worksheets or isolated interventions. It lives in everyday relationships. Classrooms, too, must be more than delivery points for mental health modules. They should be places where safety, connection, and belonging are integrated into the daily experience of children.

Otherwise, even the best-intentioned interventions risk becoming performative rituals, serving institutions more than the humans within them. So if we want to teach life skills, let’s start with relationships. Let’s involve families, consider the emotional environments children return to, and recognise that individual differences aren’t side notes.

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