For young children each new day can bring experiences and milestones to learn from, process, and cope with. Sometimes the world around them can be a confusing place and different social, physical and emotional occurrences can contribute to childhood pressures. For very young children, learning to identify, label and manage their emotions is an important life skill and steps can be made to help children develop in this area.
Parenting on Female First
Read the top tips to help children cope with their emotions and ultimately become more confident in managing them:
1. Avoid causing confusion and misunderstanding which could lead to anxiety and low confidence. Use clear, simple language appropriate for the child’s age plus supportive materials such as pictures, storybooks and role play to help convey important messages. Age appropriate materials such as the Monkey Wellbeing series of health and wellbeing education resources are a great place to start to help prepare children for new experiences. Repetition and checking back to ensure they have understood is also key.
2. Label emotions. Children who are developing their vocabulary may not yet be able to name many of their feelings, so providing them with the appropriate words can help with their identification and verbalisation of how they feel, in turn boosting self-awareness leading to more successful interactions. Talking about how other people might be feeling, for example favourite storybook, television or film characters, can help with this and allow children to become more confident in recognising their moods.
3. Acknowledge children’s feelings. If they appear to be upset, anxious or frustrated acknowledge this and talk with them about why they may feel this way. If they aren’t able to identify the cause, perhaps provide the answer, for example: “It looks like you might feel upset by being left out of the game’.” It is important to remain non-judgemental and very patient in these situations.
4. Work together constructively on a solution. Once you have talked about the problem and what could be causing their negative feelings, perhaps jointly try to identify a solution. You can use prompt questions such as ‘’what might help?’’ to guide your child in this area. This will help build confidence and independence in managing problematic situations.
5. Take some down time. It is important to acknowledge and discuss problems, but spending time worrying, dwelling on, or remaining in stressful situations can be detrimental and counterproductive. Help your child move on by changing activity or environment, perhaps moving to quiet, self-guided play. Building time for relaxation into your child’s routine is also very important to ensure they have time to process experiences, reflect, learn, and ultimately move forwards. This relaxation time is necessary for learning and restoration of energy. Becoming over tired or ‘burnt out’ by too much over whelming activity can make it harder for a child to effectively process new experiences, and ultimately contribute to stress.
For more information visit: www.monkeywellbeing.com