What then of the responses that are the givens of our genetic endowment--for example, the reactions of those who are highly volatile or painfully shy? Can temperament, which appears to be a set by the time of birth, be changed by experience? Does our biology fix our emotional destiny, or can even an innately shy child grow into a more confident adult?

Documenting the neurobiochemistry of various temperaments evidences that temperament is not destiny. Our genetic heritage endows each of us with a series of emotional set-points that determine our temperament but the brain circuitry involved is "extraordinarily malleable."

The emotional lessons of childhood can have a profound impact, either amplifying or muting an innate predisposition. The great plasticity of the brain in childhood means early experiences can have a lasting impact in sculpting neural pathways. How a child's natural temperament is treated by parents influences how children learn to handle, for example, their timidity. Timid children come into life with a neural circuitry that makes them more reactive to even mild stress. From birth, their hearts beat faster than that of other infants in response to strange or novel situations. This response appears to underlie what may develop into lifelong timidity--the person treats any new person or situation as though it were a potential threat.

Parents who engineer gradual emboldening experiences for a naturally timid child offer them what may be lifelong correctives to their fearfulness. Parents coach children emotionally by talking to them about their feelings and how to understand them; not being critical and judgmental; problem-solving in emotional predicaments; and coaching them on what to do with difficult emotions, such as offering alternatives to hitting, or withdrawing when sad.

Each of the key skills of emotional intelligence have critical periods of development, a window of time when the child is primed for developing these emotional skills; if missed, it is more difficult--though not impossible-- to learn these lessons later in life. The massive sculpting and pruning of neural circuits during childhood may be a reason why early emotional hardships and trauma have such persistent and pervasive effects in adulthood, and why psychotherapy is ineffective, or takes very long to affect some of these patterns. Even after therapy, those patterns tend to remain as underlying propensities, though with an overlay of new insights and relearned responses. This is why the remedy lies in how we prepare our young for life.

Educators, long disturbed by schoolchildren's lagging scores in math and reading, are realizing there is a different and more alarming deficiency: emotional illiteracy. And while laudable efforts are being made to raise academic standards, this new and troubling deficiency is not being addressed in the standard school curriculum. As one Brooklyn teacher put it... "We care more about how well schoolchildren can read and write than whether they'll be alive next week."

The question then appears: what would such an education in the emotions look like?

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