what the research honestly says about daily feeling-work

The largest careful look at this question pooled 213 school programs — about 270,000 children, from kindergarten to high school — that taught feelings and relationships as a regular part of the day.

The honest summary. Children in these programs did better than children who were not — on skills, on behaviour, on how they felt about school and themselves, and on studies, where the average gain was about eleven percentile points. The effects were small to moderate, not miraculous. Ordinary teachers, not specialists, ran the programs that worked. And when a program was implemented carelessly, the effects shrank toward nothing.

Read plainly, this says two things. Daily, unhurried practice of noticing and naming feelings does help — modestly, reliably. And how it is done matters as much as whether it is done. Small and steady, done well, is the mechanism. There is nothing to chase here.