The Unknown Continues…

When this pandemic started in 2020, most of us couldn’t have imagined that we would be entering 2022 still filled with uncertainty. Although, as adults, we don’t always have all the answers (especially these days!), our kids look to us to ensure them that they are taken care of no matter what the circumstances are. When you don’t have all the answers, all our children need to hear to feel secure is that we will take care of them and figure things out so that they don’t have to.

This poster was created by another counsellor who makes beautiful resources. It provides great ideas for what to say to your anxious child when you may be feeling anxious yourself!

Supporting Children in Uncertain Times

 

Calm Down Strategies

As our kids grow and mature they begin to be able to regulate their emotions. The first step in regulating emotions is learning to calm down after a big emotional reaction. When kids are young they often need help from their parents to calm down; this looks different for each child but it may come in the form of a hug or deep breathing together. With a little more maturity a child learns to calm down on their own after an emotional storm. The final step (which many adults are still working on) is to be able to identify when an emotional storm is about to begin and do something to calm down before it’s too late. This resource: https://gostrengthsftp.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/Printables/CalmDownCards_GoZenPrintables.pdf provides many calm down strategies that kids (and adults) can draw from, both before or after an emotional storm.

Becoming a Peaceful Leader for Your Strong-Willed Child – Janet Lansbury

I read this article this morning and thought it needed to be shared. It is simple and concise and it provides really great guidance for parents who have strong willed children with BIG emotions. It can be hard to empathize with our child’s feelings especially when their emotional reactions seem so much bigger than the trigger. In this article Janet Landsbury explains that the trigger is often just the straw that broke the camels back. Remembering this can help shift our mindset from “What is wrong with my child?” to “this is healthy and normal and my child trusts be enough to let these emotions out with me.” Enjoy!

Becoming a Peaceful Leader for Your Strong-Willed Child

Emotion Coaching Cheat Sheet

If you attended the virtual presentation I did yesterday on Emotion Coaching you may find this “cheat sheet” helpful when you are trying to remember the steps in emotion coaching. Often when our kids have “flipped their lids” we too flip ours which makes it hard to access the thinking part of our brain. Some families choose to post this sheet in a central location in their home!

Emotion Coaching cheat sheet

Emotion Coaching Presentation – September 22 2021 at 9:15

We all want our children to be emotionally resilient, which means they are able to process, and express their emotions in healthy ways. It also means they are able to make it through difficult times in their lives because they have the skills they need to do so.
Emotion Coaching is a parenting technique that helps children understand their feelings. When parents Emotion Coach, their children learn how emotions work and how to react to feelings in healthy ways. Parents who emotion coach help their children develop emotional resiliency.
This presentation is for any parent who wants to raise an emotionally resilient child. It is also for parents who are struggling with their child’s BIG emotions such as rage, extreme sadness, frustration and jealousy. It provides a very concrete, practical approach to responding to your child’s emotions. My hope is you will leave feeling more empowered and prepared to deal with your child’s big emotions.

I am offering an Emotion Coaching presentation to the Aubrey parent community!

When: September 22, 2021
Where: Zoom

Emotion Coaching

We all want our children to be emotionally resilient, which means they are able to process, and express their emotions in healthy ways. It also means they are able to make it through difficult times in their lives because they have the skills they need to do so.
Emotion Coaching is a parenting technique that helps children understand their feelings. When parents Emotion Coach, their children learn how emotions work and how to react to feelings in healthy ways. Parents who emotion coach help their children develop emotional resiliency.
This presentation is for any parent who wants to raise an emotionally resilient child. It is also for parents who are struggling with their child’s BIG emotions such as rage, extreme sadness, frustration and jealousy. It provides a very concrete, practical approach to responding to your child’s emotions. My hope is you will leave feeling more empowered and prepared to deal with your child’s big emotions.

5 Steps of Emotion Coaching

Step 1: Attend to the Emotion

Attend to your loved one’s emotional experience by approaching the situation calmly and acknowledging the presence of emotion (essentially not ignoring the child’s expression of emotion, whether subtle or obvious).

“I see that something is up.”

Step 2: Name It

Put into words the emotions (or range of emotions) that you think your loved one might possibly be experiencing. You may also help them to identify and describe the bodily felt sense that accompanies each named emotion.

“You look sad.”

Step 3: Validate the Emotion

This is the most important and yet the most challenging of all of the steps of emotion coaching. It communicates: “I understand you and your unique experience.”

Validating involves putting yourself in your loved one’s shoes and conveying understanding of their experience as they are experiencing it. This involves imagining what the situation must be like for them. It is important to accept, allow, and validate emotions that are different from what you expected or that are hard for you to understand.

When validating, it is also very important to resist going for the bright side, explaining with logic or trying to help them to see the situation as you see it. If you can do this, you will be showing your loved one that you understand them (and their unique experience) and this will 1) improve your relationship, 2) encourage them to keep coming to you when things get tough and 3) help them to move forward from the emotional challenge.

When validating it is also very important to “speak the unspoken”. Speaking the unspoken involves speaking that truth that you both know, but that neither of you want to say out loud.

“I can understand why you might feel sad. It really hurts to be excluded, especially when all of your friends are going to the party”.

Step 4: Meet the Need

When meeting the emotion need, it is important to refer back to the basics of emotions. Each emotion has a corresponding need from the environment.
•Sadness: soothing, giving a hug
•Anger: helping to set and defend boundaries
•Fear: protecting from danger (we do not protect anxiety! A real danger must be involved)
•Anxiety: helping to confront the anxiety-provoking situation with love and support

“Come here. Let me give you a hug.”

Step 5: Fix It/Problem-Solve

Attending to, naming and validating an emotion/emotional experience goes a long way in reducing the power of the pain. As such, this step often is unnecessary since engaging in the prior steps decrease the strength of the emotion and help the child to engage in their own problem-solving.

When this step is required, problem solving communicates “I will help you sort to this out” and it can be very helpful, but only if it comes after attending, labeling and validating the emotional experience of the child.

“Why don’t we sort out how you are going to deal with this situation when you see your friends next. And then why not catch a movie? It won’t be the same – but I think we can still have a nice time.”
Additional note: This step is critical if the child is the victim of bullying. The child will need your support to develop strategies to stand up to bullies and to access supports at school or in the community, if appropriate. Walking away from a bully is not an effective strategy despite prior teachings encouraging children to do so.

School is not working for my child!

For some kids school is a very bumpy road. Parents can feel very helpless watching their kids struggle, not knowing how to support their child or navigate the system. As a school counsellor, part of my job is to support families who are struggling in the school system. I am open to hearing parents’ concerns about their child in school and about the school itself. This article also provides some guidance.

Anger – we need to know it to tame it

Anger is a natural and healthy emotion. We all feel angry from time to time. However, when children outwardly express their angry it can be a trigger for their parents and caregivers. The more children and their parents understand anger the better they become at expressing it and reacting to the expression of it. This article provides very practical ways to discuss anger with children.