Social-Emotional Learning · Loneliness · Early Childhood Education
मैं अकेलापन चुनता नहीं हूं, केवल स्वीकार करता हूं। – अज्ञेय (Agyeya)
“loneliness is … yearning for an unattainable perfect internal state” ~ Melanie Klein
While running general Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) programs in schools, our standard operation is to convert distress into a skill lesson, something that can be met through individual competency. But in the new era we have already walked into, not every “problem” can be “fixed.” Loneliness is one of those things.
Does loneliness need fixing? Could it be fixed?
SEL programs need to evolve quickly to meet present-day demands, and the solution lies in Early Childhood Education theories: John Bowlby, Mary Ainsworth, and above all Melanie Klein, who supervised Bowlby.
Bowlby broke with Klein on whether “the real environment matters.”
We do not primarily live among real people; we live among internal objects: fantasized versions of the people who have mattered.
Melanie Klein
Can we ever convey our inner state, or be fully understood, even among friends? It is not a complaint about company but a structural fact: the gap between inner experience and anything that can be shared.
“No one understands me” blames the other: the people around me are inadequate; the right person would get me. Klein says the failure is not in the quality of other people at all.
The takeaway
The failure is not in the quality of the people around us. It is structural: the gap between inner experience and anything that can be shared. None of which a better friend could fix.
About the author
Abhidha Seth
Founder, The ZERO Curriculum™ · Program Director, Piramal Foundation
Abhidha Seth is the Founder of The ZERO Curriculum™ (a first-of-its-kind contextual, rights-based, multilingual and play-based preschool curriculum) and of Preschool for Child Rights™. A strategic education leader with 21+ years across government, academia, and philanthropic ecosystems, she currently serves as Program Director at the Piramal Foundation. Her work spans Early Childhood Care & Education (ECCE), Foundational Literacy & Numeracy (FLN), Social-Emotional Learning, system transformation, and gender-transformative education. A Gold Medalist in Masters in Human Development and JRF/NET scholar, she has built curricula, assessment tools, and teacher-training programmes with NCERT, CECED, Ambedkar University Delhi, UNICEF, and the World Bank.
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