Loneliness and social isolation, it’s worth noting, are often used interchangeably, but the concepts are distinct. Loneliness is a feeling that may or may not depend on how many meaningful confidants a person has—some people feel lonely or suffer from chronic loneliness despite not being socially isolated. Still, social isolation is a leading contributor to loneliness.

Read: Single people aren’t to blame for the loneliness epidemic.

The ideal school curriculum for teaching loneliness prevention, Holt-Lunstad says, would target social isolation as well as the cognitive processes that make people feel lonelier—while, of course, teaching students the health risks associated with loneliness. “Recognizing that it’s something that we need to take seriously for our health is a primary and critical step,” she says.

Holt-Lunstad advocates for a sort of “social education”—similar to efforts by schools to provide, say, sex education and physical education—that would be integrated into existing health-education curricula to teach students how to build and maintain friendships and relationships. Learning how to provide the kind of help and support a friend or partner feels a need for is an invaluable social skill that can be taught in the classroom, she adds. For example, when a friend who is broke asks for money but instead receives a lecture on financial management, she isn’t likely to feel she’s been supported in the way she needs.

Of course, Holt-Lunstad isn’t the first to wish students learned more social-support and empathy skills during the school day. Since as far back as 1976, researchers have recommended social education as a way to teach teens how to foster and maintain healthy relationships. In 2000, the academic E. Wayne Ross took a different approach when he wrote for Theory & Research in Social Education that individual teachers, particularly social-studies teachers, should take care to teach history and civics from multiple perspectives to foster empathy and quell alienation among diverse groups of students. Social-skills training has also been implemented in many schools for special-needs students , and some schools have already taken measures outside classrooms to encourage social support among students, such as instituting a “buddy bench,” where kids can sit during recess or lunch to indicate that they could use a friend.

But Holt-Lunstad believes that loneliness-prevention education should not be limited to teaching students how to support others. She also believes that kids should learn early in life how to reframe their own negative responses to social situations. “We’ve all had a situation where you text someone and they don’t respond right away,” she says. “Instead of assuming they’re snubbing you, they’re blowing you off, all of these kinds of negative things that could in turn lead you to respond with nasty comments or become irritated, which is not going to elicit the sort of friendly response you want,” she says, “reframe it as, ‘Perhaps they’re driving.’ ‘Perhaps they’re in a meeting.’ If you’re interpreting others’ social signals as negative, how you behave toward them is more likely to mirror that.” The existing strategies for helping people repackage their thoughts in a more positive way could easily be adapted for a classroom setting.