The following article was published in the National Post on Thursday, January 19, 2012.

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In our ever-connected digital world children today find themselves under more social pressure than ever before, while at the same time they are faced with making defining life choices at increasingly younger ages.

It was the recognition that children are bombarded with life-altering choices well before their high schools years that prompted educator Janet King to create national youth charity kids.now more than a decade ago.

Established to provide free after-school/in-school group mentoring programs to grade 7 and 8 students, kids. now is designed to encourage young people to believe in themselves to make positive choices that help them reach their full potential.

Based upon the concept of “emotional intelligence” or the ability to use emotions effectively and productively, the 12week kids.now program focuses on five key elements deemed critical to success in school and life in general: self-esteem, goal setting, communication, conflict resolution and stress management.

Research on the importance of developing emotional intelligence had first been done on adults and Ms. King was the first to hit upon the idea that a mentoring program based on those principles would best serve children in the pivotal years of grades 7 and 8.

“It is a critical age when kids are so influenced by their peers and they are having such challenges in how to fit in,” says Ms. King, the group’s founder and president. “When kids are feeling good about themselves they are going to want to fit in with a better crowd. When they are not feeling good about themselves then they don’t have the confidence about themselves, and the chances of being sucked up into a gang or a group that is going nowhere are that much greater.”

Those middle school years are also the time when children make choices that will affect their adult lives. “Kids are deciding in grades 7 and 8 if they want to go to university and graduate from university. So give that kid the skills to make the right choices” before they go down the wrong path such as taking drugs or joining a gang,” Ms. King says.

kids.now has run more than 1,000 programs across Canada, helping more than 11,000 young people, and it currently runs more than 230 programs serving about 2,300 children in Ontario, Alberta and New Brunswick.

The importance of social emotional learning/life-success skills provided by kids.now has a prominent backer in Joshua Freedman, chief operating officer of California-based Six Seconds, an organization that provides emotional intelligence training programs to children and adults.

“I used to be a middle school teacher so I know that it is an extremely volatile time for kids,” he says.

The pressures on middle graders are far higher than on their parents given the influence of the Internet and alwayson social media, Mr. Freedman says. For their parents, the high point of social pressure might have been a single event such as their first school dance. “I would say that is their lives 18 hours a day, because of the prevalence of social media.”

That two-year “pressure cooker” mixing biology and technology is also “a time that so much of their personality will be defined, so these skills are not optional,” Mr. Freedman adds.

The benefits of the emotional intelligence skills that his organization and kids.now teaches are measureable. In the United States, children who are in schools with social/emotional programs score 10% higher on SAT tests, for example. “They do better [academically] and we waste less resources, we spend less time on discipline issues. It is kind of a no-brainer when you look at it that way.”

Rich Lash, a director of management consulting firm Hay Group and emotional intelligence expert , has trained kids. now staff and is a strong supporter of the program. “I think it is very valuable and it is wonderful work that [Ms. King] is doing. “I think that is a wonderful opportunity for these kids at this young age to get exposed to positions of leadership and to understand concepts that most adults don’t even get to experience,” Mr. Lash says.

He points to the famous “marshmallow” delayed gratification test whereby researchers presented children with the option of eating one marshmallow immediately or waiting a period of time and be allowed to eat two of the treats.

“One of the hallmarks of effective leaders is the ability to subordinate your own needs and desires for the good of others or the good of the group as a whole, which is a very difficult thing for children – even adults – to be able to do,” Mr. Lash says. “The ability to delay gratification is a huge predictor in peoples’ overall success in life.”

“Giving that to children early in life is absolutely essential, but it also gives them a lifetime to practice it and reap the benefits of it.”

View feature article layout in National Post.

The following article was published in the National Post on Thursday, January 19, 2012.

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A participant in the inaugural kids.now mentoring session in 1999, Carey Escoffery traces much of his academic and career success to kids.now.

“One of the things you are going to get at school is the technical know-how but the program prepares you for the softer side of things, such as relationship-building,” says Mr. Escoffery, 27, who grew up in Toronto’s notorious JaneFinch area and is now an analyst with BMO Financial in Toronto.

“That is probably the most important thing that I walked away with,” he adds. “How to speak to people, your temperament, and how to deal with people. Those are skills that are extremely important for anything that you are going to do but I can’t remember any [academic] course that I have taken that focused on those soft skills.”

Not only did kids.now give the University of Toronto graduate key relationship skills, it also armed him a set of with goal-setting skills “that was huge” and what he calls “forward thinking” abilities.

“When you are in grade 1 and 2, you know exactly what you want to do: You want to be an astronaut or you want to be a firefighter. As you get older it starts to fade away and you are not really thinking about what comes next.”

After taking the kids.now program, Mr. Escoffery was sure he would have a career in computers and he pursued it in his first year of university before switching to a commerce and finance degree.

“I found the one that really fit my personality and my skill set and, yes, that foundation was really set much earlier on.”

kids.now, which is promoting the national Mentor Youth Day on Jan. 25, also has a positive influence on the volunteer mentors who lead the 12-week programs.

“It has been really rewarding for me to see them have a goal and put that goal out and have a way to achieve it,” says Amanda Oreto, a fourth-year McMaster University student in the midst of mentoring a group of middle-school students, and who hopes to become a teacher after graduation this year.

“kids.now started off as a way for me to get back involved with my community, something I had lost touch with after university. I loved the idea of kids having access to a program that addressed issues at a time when they needed it the most,” says Arjun Saraf, a kids.now coach mentor at Meadowvale Public School in Mississauga, Ont., in the fall of 2010 and currently the controller at New Haven Mortgage. “The focus on aspects such as leadership, guidance and self-esteem really helps, and as a coach mentor I saw this with my own eyes. My favourite part – as cliche as it is – was to make a difference.”

Mr. Saraf now sits on the kids.now board financial committee as a volunteer to the financial team. He graduated from Carlton University with background in economics and pre-law.

“I have joined the board for the charity because I understand the true potential of this program now and I would like to take an active role in spreading it throughout communities in Canada and, maybe some day, across the world.”

View feature article layout in National Post.