The Happiest Children
The Smart Love Approach
The Happiest Preschool: A Manual for Teachers incorporates the Smart Love approach to build a classroom culture of caring, cooperation, creativity, learning, and emotional health. Parents tell us these same qualities are vitally important in their own parenting, so we’ve created a fun way to learn Smart Love fundamentals. When parents and caregivers take a positive, developmentally informed approach to children’s emotions, behavior, and learning process, parenting is more enjoyable and effective.
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Managing Behavior with Care
A significant part of the Smart Love approach is understanding how to manage children’s behavior. When behavior poses a health or safety risk, it is stopped immediately without adding any punitive measures. This means regulating behavior in a positive way, without attaching negative consequences. The focus is on helping children understand what led to the behavior that needs regulating.​​​
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By incorporating the S.M.A.R.T. acronym, which stands for
Stay Positive, Model Kindness, Acknowledge and Accept Feelings, Regulate
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Understanding Developmental Stages
Behavior, and Time With, you can preserve a loving and positive relationship while regulating immature behaviors.
Smart Love emphasizes learning about children’s natural stages. For example, preschoolers often experience the “all-powerful self,” which is a developmental phase for preschoolers that embodies children’s unrealistic beliefs that they have enhanced powers, both physical and cognitive. This is a normal phase that will be outgrown as cognition matures. Recognizing stages like this helps parents respond with loving regulation. Using loving regulation means ​
responding with kindness and understanding rather than discipline, disapproval, lectures, isolation, or coping mechanisms when children display antisocial, resistant, or out-of-control behavior.
S.M.A.R.T. at Home
By bringing Smart Love into your home, you can create a joyful, nurturing environment where children feel safe, valued, loved, and confident. This helps them avoid patterns that interfere with happiness, such as learned needs for painful, uncomfortable, self-defeating, or self-destructive experiences and an aversive reaction to pleasure— the reactive need to make oneself unhappy in some way after a success or a period of feeling happy.
Relationships Matter Most
A child’s relationship with you is the most important factor in social and emotional learning, because it develops most fully through imitation. Smart Love is based on the reality that children imitate how they are treated. Based on our extensive experience working with children and families, we have learned that the approach is an indispensable tool for sustaining and nurturing children’s emotional well-being.
