helps children and adults to recover from stressful episodes.

The stress of life in the 1990s is taking its toll on adults and young people and anger management could hold the key to future stability and prosperity.

In fact, someone watching a half-hour broadcast of the Cable News Network in the 1990s will see and hear far more information than people living in the 1890s.

"That's a lot of information. Human beings have the capacity, but do we know how to manage it?'' Jeff Goelitz of HeartMath Ltd. said this week.

Mr. Goelitz and fellow Heart-Math executive Joseph Sundram are conducting workshops and meeting with counsellors at the Coalition for the Protection of Children.

Since June, HeartMath has been a cornerstone of the Coalition's effort to change child-rearing practices in Bermuda.

HeartMath is a series of training programmes designed to help reduce tension, burnout, stress, and anger.

Based on extensive research on the physiological and psychological link between the body and emotional well being, HeartMath is used by a large number of Governments, schools, individuals, and community organisations.

Both men are former educators now working in separate divisions of the HeartMath consulting firm.

"HeartMath is used to improve literacy, anger management, and it comes from world class biomedical research,'' Mr. Goelitz said. "That work has been translated into a set of programmes and products designed to help people deal with stressful living, improve their performance, and problem-solving.'' Mr. Sundram said HeartMath could help Bermudians reduce the stress of their daily lives and reduce child abuse and violence.

"Bermuda, like a lot of other countries, is struggling with change in the family, economy, and density of information and community,'' Mr. Sundram said.

"The Coalition, which is now certified to deliver some aspects of HeartMath training, is well-placed to deliver some of that training.

"In the challenges to the family and society, especially physical and family abuse, employment and recreational issues, the Coalition can make significant contribution to the Bermudian community.'' One of HeartMath's innovations is to enrol students, including disruptive ones, into elective courses at schools with HeartMath programmes.

Those students, to get their grade, must then teach HeartMath to younger students.

"Do they ever learn it? They have to because they have to teach it,'' Mr.

Goelitz said.

Students trained in HeartMath are better prepared to learn in school, he said, because they were better able to control stress. Mr. Goelitz cited a study of a total of 60 students half of whom were trained in his company's programme.

After a battery of tests designed to put them under a variety of stresses, HeartMath students were more relaxed than those in the experiment's control group.

"The tests push all the buttons. And the HeartMath students were better able to recover,'' he said. "The quicker the recovery the better equipped to deal with learning.'' "Recovery is a critical adult skill to adapt,'' Mr. Sundram said. "The tools of HeartMath help people to learn enhanced learning capacity and will be able to balance a more emotional way of dealing with life.'' The toll of contemporary life is being shown in the lives of young people the men said, using the example of school violence in the US.

"What it all comes down to is for adults, there needs to be closer attention and caring paid to kids,'' Mr. Goelitz said. "Teachers need to see that kids are more than academic creatures. There is a shifting framework for educators.

Kids need care and time.'' Mr. Goelitz added he was once told by a teenaged girl: "A lot of parents love their children. But not many care for them.'' Mr. Sundram added: "The change we must make, which includes HeartMath, is not about blame, but having deep compassion and believing that heart intelligence can offer some very significant tools to take us through this.'' He said the African saying, "it takes a village to raise a child'', was important in the next century.

But Mr. Sundram added: "There is also an ancient Chinese saying that is also necessary, `Crisis is danger plus opportunity', that's how we have to look at the stress of life. The opportunity is where we build the strength of today and tomorrow.'' Information on HeartMath can be found on the Internet at www.heartmath.com.

The men can be contacted at the Coalition for the Protection of Children for counselling and presentations on the HeartMath programme.