Emotional Literacy: The Missing Link in health literacy for underserved populations public health, special issue on health literacy

Health literacy is recognised as key to reducing health disparities. In this commentary, we discuss findings and implications of a feasibility study of a family-oriented, multi-component, play-based intervention that initially was designed to target basic literacy, food literacy, and physical literacy in tandem with parenting practices to improve underserved children's wellbeing. The study showed that the providers could not effectively work with these literacies until a more basic set of social and emotional skills, or emotional literacy, had been developed. The study made it abundantly clear that working with severely underserved populations implied that such skills, that might be taken for granted in less impacted families, needed to be an explicit point of intervention. We propose an empirically based, stepwise approach to intervention and present a model highlighting the complex interaction between social vulnerability, promotion of health literacy, and intervention strategy. Implications for health literacy interventions and public health are discussed.