Marc Brackett has experience as an emotion scientist and is the founding director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. His book provides a blueprint for understanding our emotions and using them wisely so that they help, rather than hinder, our success and well-being. 

The core of his method is called RULER, a system that has been successfully implemented in numerous schools, reducing stress and burnout, improving school climate, and enhancing academic achievement. The acronym RULER involves these five steps – recognising, understanding, labelling, expressing, and regulating emotions.

One of the tools from RULER that I like to use is the Mood Meter which has a grid of 100 emotions, organised into four quadrants - High Energy, Low Energy, High Pleasantess and Low Pleasantness, helping students expand their emotional vocabulary.  We created a Mood Meter of our own which we regularly use as a check-in in Health class. 

Our earliest experiences shape our lives far down the road, and What Happened to You? provides powerful scientific and emotional insights into the behavioural patterns so many of us struggle to understand. 

I found this book to be extremely powerful as it helped me build more empathy and understanding towards others, recognising that people usually have a reason behind their actions, even if that reason is subconscious. I learnt a lot about trauma, childhood adversity and different types of coping mechanisms.

Changing the conversation from "What is wrong with you?" to "What happened to you?" helps us attempt to better understand people and ourselves. 

One of the most interesting findings was that relational health - connectedness to family, community and culture is more predictive of your mental health than your history of adversity. In other words, connectedness has the power to counterbalance adversity.

From celebrity M.D. Dr. Drew Pinsky and his daughter Paulina Pinsky comes an entertaining and comprehensive guide to sex, relationships, and consent in today’s #MeToo era. Perfect for teens, parents, and educators to facilitate open and positive conversations around the tricky topic of consent.

When it comes to sex, relationships, and consent, establishing boundaries and figuring out who you are and what you want is never simple—especially as a teenager. What’s the line between a friendship and a romantic partner? How can you learn to trust your body's signals? And what if you’re not quite sure what your sexuality is? 

Filled with tangible and accessible resources, and featuring humorous and raw personal anecdotes, this is the perfect guide for teens, parents, and educators to go beyond “the talk” and dive into honest and meaningful conversations about sex, relationships, and consent.

What I took from this book is the idea that a healthy relationship consists of three things - Trust, Compassion and Boundaries. 

Author Peggy Orenstein's new book, Boys & Sex, is based on extensive interviews with more than 100 college and college-bound boys and young men across the U.S. between the ages of 16 and 22 on intimacy, consent and navigating masculinity. They spanned a broad range of races, religions, classes and sexual orientations.

Something I feel very strongly about is the need to have open and honest dialogue with young people about consent, sex and healthy relationships. As Orenstein says "If we don't talk to our kids [about sex], the media is going to educate them for us, and we are not going to love the result."

I'm excited to now read Orenstein's book Girls and Sex.

As surprising as it may be to parents, young people today are immersed in porn culture everywhere they look. Through Internet porn, gaming, social media, marketing, and advertising, kids today have a much broader view of social and sexual possibilities, which makes it difficult for them to establish appropriate expectations or to feel adequate in their own sexuality. Even more important, no one is talking to kids directly about the problem. 

Sexploitation exposes the truth to parents, kids, educators, and the medical profession about the seen and unseen influences affecting children, inspiring parents to take the role as the primary sexuality educator. With more information, parents will gain conviction to discuss and develop values, expectations, boundaries, and rules with their kids. Kids who enter their teens with accurate information and truths stand a better chance of developing an "inner compass" when it comes to sex and relationships, which sets them up for a healthy adulthood.