This time of year can often feel like a heavy lift filled with high expectations. With this, parents often experience heightened emotions and so do our children. All while we might be having expectations of "best" behavior during a time that it proves to be quite difficult for our kiddos. What are some things you can do to support your children through the big winter feels?
Let's make generosity a natural part of our lives and our children's lives. Together we can create a kinder, more compassionate and inclusive world. Let's find our passions and engage our children to find theirs.
With a bit of history, you will learn where social-emotional learning originated - and you may find it quite fascinating how long it's really been around. From schools, and classrooms, to homes and out in our community, social-emotional learning becomes a responsibility for all of us. Let's teach it to our children across all settings and nurture this vital life long learning.
Parents, caretakers and teachers- It is critical to show kindness to our children, validate how they are feeling, be empathetic, and compassionate. Children learn from us; how you treat yourself and other's is how they will learn to treat themselves and other's. How can we help the next generation lead a life with deep kindness?
Living a life with gratitude can support a life of self-worth, resiliency, selfless behavior, greater joy; reducing depression and increases happiness. According to various studies, instilling gratitude in our children from a young age, is linked to happiness as they grow up. So, how can we teach gratitude to our children?
We can all experience feelings of worry, fear, or anxiety when we perceive a threat or encounter something new. Children are often faced with new experiences that will naturally cause them to feel these big emotions. How can adults help coach children through these feelings?
All children should live in a home and attend school in an environment where they feel emotionally safe and supported, where their feelings are heard, accepted, understood and met with empathy. Teaching our children the vocabulary to label their emotions is a powerful tool that will benefit them for life.
It can be quite difficult to respond calmly, rather than react emotionally, in times when our children are experiencing big feelings. There are some specific things we can attend to in ourselves and some strategies we can use in doing our best to stay calm.
When we respond to children with patience and compassion, and continuously model healthy strategies, we create a sense of belonging, safety and security. As co-regulation occurs, a child's incredible developing brain, literally creates new pathways and they discover their own capabilities in using self-soothing strategies and eventually learn self-regulation.
Knowledge is power. Teaching children about their brains is an important step in their self-awareness. There are simple ways to teach children about the brain, where their emotions, memories, behaviors and thinking come from and how they are interconnected. This can help children understand why their emotions can overwhelm them and throw their thinking brain offline.
There are 5 important actions we can take as parents or caretakers to create secure and safe relationships with our children. These actions will support a strong foundation for the parent/child relationship and will continue to benefit your child through adolescence and adulthood.
There are numerous benefits to journaling, or expressive writing, at any age. Scientific research tells us that journaling can show improvements in mental health, physical health, self-awareness, problem solving skills, creativity, communication, academics - and more!
