The term “emotional growth education” was created by Linda Houghton in the early 1980s to describe workshops and other specialty programs at the first CEDU School.
The term was meant to clearly define how the curriculum used child development principles and healthy stages of growth to create self-esteem and develop greater skills in communication, work ethic, self-awareness and academic study. She used the principles of child development as described by Erik Erikson to bring understanding of the emotional growth workshop curriculum to parents, faculty and referring professionals. Ms. Houghton went on to found two schools (Mount Bachelor Academy and the King George School) attempting to improve what she calls “holistic education” or “a new way of looking at things”. These schools and programs were designed as models for the assimilation of emotional growth, academics, the arts and other specialized learning.
There are subtle differences between emotional growth and therapeutic schools. Emotional growth theory developed from the idea that immaturity was the cause for behavior problems in teens. With a tightly structured community where consequences for behavior were immediate and appropriate, the student might learn from his/her mistakes and grow appropriately. However, a strictly emotional growth curriculum is considered ineffective for students with deep-seated trauma or serious psychiatric disorders such as bipolar, anorexia, etc. A TBS will add clinical treatments to the emotional growth curriculum, comprising medications, for students with more serious disorders. The original emotional growth programs rarely incorporated medications for the students. Over the years, as more schools and programs were created, the term “emotional growth” was used and misused to describe vastly different therapeutic schools that sometimes did not adhere to the basic components required for true emotional growth education.