INCREASED PARENT ACTIVISM over school curriculum and concerns about critical race theory being taught in schools have roiled school board meetings over the past year. Sometimes, parents have connected these debates to school plans to implement social and emotional learning programs as well.

Those connections may be tenuous — or completely overblown — but there are important reasons school and district leaders should take special care to connect with parents and the broader community as they work to better foster students’ social and emotional learning and health.

The most important reason schools must consider parent views on SEL is that, unlike academics, SEL is as much a family responsibility as a school responsibility. No one expects parents to be the experts when students need help factoring polynomials or making sense of the periodic table. On the other hand, learning to set goals, exhibit empathy toward others, control emotions and behavior, and other SEL-related skills are things parents teach their children from the earliest ages.

A recent nationally representative poll of parents conducted by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and YouGov shows that parents believe they themselves were most responsible for their children developing SEL-related skills, followed by other family members, and the child herself/himself. Parents rated teachers a somewhat distant fourth.

So if families are key to developing these abilities, how best can schools engage them? Here are a few ideas.

»Talk in specifics. A lot of the controversy around SEL (and CRT) in schools boils down to a lack of specifics. When parents hear about concrete practices and goals, they can engage, offer more informed feedback and support school efforts. The survey found that when asked whether schools should be helping students cultivate specific SEL-related skills, such as goal setting or controlling one’s emotions, parent support was very high. Unfortunately, SEL advocates often couch their advice in jargon, abstractions, complicated diagrams and confusing rhetoric. This loses parents who might support more concrete initiatives.

»Consider calling it something else. Although parents responded very positively to specific SEL-related goals, the survey found support for the term “social-emotional learning” is lower, especially among Republican parents. Parents rated program titles such as “life skills,” “social-emotional and academic learning,” “emotional intelligence” and “positive youth development” much higher.

»Ensure SEL programs aren’t interfering with academics. About half of parents agree with the statement “Schools should focus on academics and leave SEL to parents and others,” implying that if they have to choose between SEL and academics, many parents will eschew the former. Advocates often argue (or imply) that such a choice is incoherent — that SEL is so helpful to students’ academics that it is almost logically impossible for them to be in conflict. It’s hard to generalize about whether SEL programs are the highest value use of scarce school resources, but the concern that a well-meaning idea could get in the way of making real progress is not far-fetched. Because any group of parents will include skeptics, ensuring that SEL is never in conflict with a school’s academic mission will help to reassure parents that the programs are worthwhile.

»You might not need a new program. The survey found some parents are more comfortable if SEL is being delivered implicitly and in more traditional ways. This serves as a reminder that the idea of supporting students in ways that go beyond academics isn’t new. At the same time, newfangled programs, which may consume precious staff training time and other resources, may fail to take advantage of the SEL expertise and resources the teachers, parents and youth leaders in your community already possess. Simply supporting teachers to do their jobs better and engage more productively with parents and students may yield positive effects on both SEL and academics, while limiting additional costs.

ADAM TYNER is national research director at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute in Washington, D.C. Twitter: @redandexpert