Psicólogo impulsa educación emocional en escuelas para prevenir traumas y violencia

Lucas Malaisi sits in his office at 45, a man shaped by early loss—his mother died in an accident when he was a child—and now he has made it his life's work to ensure that other children learn to name their pain before it hardens into something worse. The psychologist and president of the Emotional Education Foundation has spent more than a decade pushing a simple but radical idea through Argentine legislatures: that schools should teach emotional literacy the way they teach math and reading, as a formal subject from kindergarten through secondary school.

The idea has gained traction. Five provinces have already passed emotional education laws—Jujuy, Tucumán, Chaco, Corrientes, and Misiones—and Salta recently gave it partial approval. Yet Malaisi is clear-eyed about what a law actually accomplishes. It sends a message, a foundational one: that it is legitimate to talk about what you feel inside a school building. But a law on paper is not the same as a law in practice. In some provinces where it passed, the legislation has become what Malaisi calls "dead letter"—approved but not implemented, gathering dust while the system moves on. The real work requires teacher training and political will, resources that have flowed more readily to private schools with autonomy and money than to vulnerable neighborhoods where the need is greatest.

When Malaisi describes what emotional education actually is, he is precise. It is not therapy. It is not asking teachers to become clinicians. Instead, it is creating space in the school day for children to name what they feel, to put emotion into words, and through that act of naming, to begin to regulate it. When a child says aloud that she is sad, when she speaks the word and hears it in the room, the emotion loses some of its grip. She develops the capacity to recognize it, to understand what triggered it, to manage it. Over time, children who practice this develop empathy. They learn to know themselves. The goal is not to eliminate difficult feelings but to build the skills to live with them.

Malaisi argues for a dual approach: emotional education should be woven through other subjects—the math teacher can teach it, the history teacher can teach it—but it should also have its own curricular slot, its own hour in the week. The reason is practical. When something is everyone's responsibility, it often becomes no one's. A transversal approach sounds good in theory but fails in practice because each teacher assumes the next one will handle it. A dedicated class ensures it actually happens.

The evidence he cites is compelling. The famous marshmallow experiment followed children from age four into adulthood. Those who could delay gratification, who could sit with the discomfort of wanting something now and waiting for more later, had better grades at eighteen, were more social, played more sports. By twenty-eight, they had better economic outcomes. The skill was not innate; it was learned. Emotional intelligence can be taught, and the teaching of it produces measurable results: better academic performance, fewer behavioral problems, improved quality of life.

When asked whether emotional education could prevent school violence, Malaisi resists the urge to oversimplify. Violence in schools is not a single problem with a single cause. It is systemic, a fraying of the social fabric that shows itself in many ways. Education cannot solve everything, but it can prevent some wounds from becoming trauma. A wound becomes trauma when a child has no capacity to manage it and no loving adult to hold them through it. The same wound, met with skill and compassionate presence, simply heals.

Malaisi's own books—Emotional Coherence, Emotional Nutrition, Creative Mode, and the forthcoming Emotional Tribe—are written for people he describes as broken, people carrying old wounds that need tending. His purpose, he says, is to awaken consciousness through emotional education. He practices what he preaches: he deleted Instagram from his phone and keeps it only on his desktop, a form of intermittent digital fasting. He is aware of the damage that social media and smartphones have inflicted on adolescents, the anxiety epidemic that researcher Jonathan Haidt documented in his bestselling work. Australia, Denmark, and England are now restricting social media access for children under sixteen and banning phones from schools. Parents in many places are making pacts to remove devices from their children's hands.

The larger vision Malaisi holds is one in which children grow up learning to listen to themselves, to recognize what they feel, to speak it, and to act in alignment with their own truth. If schools began to cultivate self-love explicitly, to show children what loving treatment looks like, what it feels like to be treated with care, then perhaps they would begin to expect it for themselves and offer it to others. That is the work ahead: not just passing laws, but building the infrastructure and commitment to make them real.