What the research says

You’re not imagining it.

Teachers across the country are reporting the same thing: children are arriving at school with big feelings and no way to hold them. Here is what the evidence actually shows — and what it doesn’t.

76%

of elementary teachers say student behavior has gotten worse in the past year.

EdWeek Research Center survey of 5,802 teachers, August–November 2025

It isn’t just your classroom. Or your kid.

If it feels like something shifted, you’re in good company. Three separate bodies — a federal survey, a national research center, and an independent education survey — found the same pattern using three different methods.

82%

of K–12 teachers say the pandemic’s lasting impact on student behavior has been negative.

Pew Research Center, 2,531 U.S. public school teachers, fielded Oct.–Nov. 2023

78%

say the same about students’ emotional well-being.

Pew Research Center, same survey

79%

of U.S. public schools report the pandemic’s lingering effects still negatively affect students’ socio-emotional development.

NCES School Pulse Panel, May 2025

67%

of schools say they need more training on supporting students’ socio-emotional development.

NCES School Pulse Panel, May 2025

A note on what these questions actually ask: each one asks whether the pandemic’s lingering effects are still to blame. So they measure what school leaders attribute the problem to — which is not quite the same as measuring the problem.

And it lands hardest on the youngest.

This is the part that surprised us. The strain isn’t concentrated in middle school or high school, where you might expect it. It’s concentrated in the grades where children are four, five, and six years old.

37%

of schools serving kindergarten said most kindergarteners behaved worse than typical expectations for the grade.

NCES School Pulse Panel, May 2025 — higher than grades 1 through 4, and the only early grade that did not significantly improve year over year

76%

of elementary teachers report behavior got worse this past year — against 54% of high school teachers.

EdWeek Research Center, 5,802 teachers, Aug.–Nov. 2025

It’s not only how it feels. It was measured.

Perception surveys tell you what adults believe. One study went further and actually assessed the children. Researchers followed 662 preschoolers in Denver into kindergarten and compared the cohort whose preschool year was disrupted against the cohorts before them.

The disrupted cohort entered kindergarten 17 to 18 percentage points behind on measures of executive function and social-emotional development. Early math was affected too. Vocabulary and early literacy were not.

The researchers’ own summary: “Developmental disadvantages were observed across all income levels.” This was one city and one program, and the social-emotional measures were adult-rated — but it is a real measurement of real children, not a survey of impressions.

What’s actually missing is narrower than “behavior.”

Ask teachers of the youngest children what they’re seeing, and the answer keeps landing in the same small place. Not defiance. Not disrespect, exactly. Something more specific:

Children don’t have a way to handle the moment when things don’t go their way.

The disappointment. The turn that doesn’t come. The game they lose. The word no. The waiting. That’s the gap — and it shows up as a meltdown, or a shutdown, or a shove, because a four-year-old without words for a feeling will use their body instead.

Teachers have said what they think would help

Asked what would make a major positive difference for student behavior, teachers picked from ten options. The second-most-chosen — above tougher consequences, above screen limits, above more counselors — was this:

58% chose “instruction for parents on teaching children how to behave in ways that are appropriate for school.”

EdWeek Research Center, 5,802 teachers, Aug.–Nov. 2025

Teachers aren’t asking for stricter kids. They’re asking for something to put in a family’s hands — a shared language that works the same way at the kitchen table as it does in the classroom.

There’s research behind why that matters. A meta-analysis of 117 studies found that programs deliberately connecting families and schools improved children’s social-behavioral competence and mental health — with parent–teacher communication and home-based involvement among the active ingredients. Notably, the one form of parent involvement that did not help children’s achievement, across 448 studies, was helping with homework.

This is the problem we built the Krewe to meet.

We didn’t start with a market report. We started with a child we love, whose big feelings arrived faster than the words to name them — and we went looking for something to help, and didn’t find what we needed.

Some things are made because they should exist. This is one of them.

Watching it happen, I realized something: we spend so much time teaching children what to do that we forget to teach them how to feel. We often do a phenomenal job teaching them to hide what they’re feeling instead — not to name it, understand it, or cope with it. And certainly not to know that it’s okay to feel it at all.

— Toni McGee Causey, creator of The Krewelings

The research on this page didn’t tell us what to build. It told us we weren’t the only ones seeing it. What we built is a set of twenty characters — each one carrying a feeling a child already has — and the tools that go with them.

How it’s meant to work

  • First
    Name it

    A feeling with a face and a friend is a feeling a child can point to. “I feel like Cubby right now.”

  • Then
    Understand it

    Feelings aren’t behavior, and they aren’t the boss of what happens next. That’s a learnable idea.

  • Then
    Handle it

    Every character comes with things to actually try — not “calm down,” but something to do with your hands, your body, your breath.

  • And then
    Understand others

    A child who knows what their own feeling looks like can start to recognize it on someone else’s face. That’s where empathy begins.

A word about what we’re not claiming. The studies on this page measure the problem, not our products — we haven’t run a trial on the Krewelings and we won’t pretend otherwise. What the research supports is the shape of the need. What we can tell you about the cards and the workbook is what’s in them, and why we made each choice.

Free download · For educators, counselors & curious parents

The evidence file — including the parts most people leave out.

Everything on this page, with every source, every sample size, and every caveat. Plus the section we think is the most useful thing in it: four things you’ve been told about children and big feelings that the current research no longer supports.

  • The famous marshmallow test doesn’t predict what you were told it predicts
  • What “name it to tame it” actually rests on — and where it breaks down
  • The popular classroom mindset framework with an effect near zero
  • The screen-time claim even the American Academy of Pediatrics has stopped framing that way

What you’ll get:

  • Every statistic on this page, with its source, sample size and date
  • Verified citations for 13 peer-reviewed studies — DOIs included
  • The four claims we won’t make, and why
  • A one-page summary you can hand to an administrator


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Sources on this page

  1. Pew Research Center (2024). What’s It Like To Be a Teacher in America Today? Survey of 2,531 U.S. public K-12 teachers, fielded Oct. 17 – Nov. 14, 2023; margin of sampling error ±2.4 points.
  2. EdWeek Research Center (2026). The State of Teaching 2026. Online survey of 5,802 teachers, August–November 2025.
  3. National Center for Education Statistics, School Pulse Panel, May 2025 collection. NCES labels these experimental data; the respondent is the school leader.
  4. Le, V.-N., Schaack, D., Cisneros, C., & Gregory, J. (2025). The COVID-19 Pandemic’s Disruptions to Preschool Children’s Cognitive, Social-Emotional, and Executive Functioning Skills. AERA Open, 11. doi:10.1177/23328584251330165
  5. Sheridan, S. M., Smith, T. E., Moorman Kim, E., Beretvas, S. N., & Park, S. (2019). A Meta-Analysis of Family-School Interventions and Children’s Social-Emotional Functioning. Review of Educational Research, 89(2), 296–332. doi:10.3102/0034654318825437
  6. Barger, M. M., Kim, E. M., Kuncel, N. R., & Pomerantz, E. M. (2019). The relation between parents’ involvement in children’s schooling and children’s adjustment: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 145(9), 855–890. doi:10.1037/bul0000201

Full citations, effect sizes and caveats are in the downloadable evidence file above.