Three Ways to Help Kids with Emotional Regulation:
Helping kids learn to manage their emotions is crucial for their overall well-being and development. Emotional regulation skills can be taught and reinforced through various strategies.
Three Ways to Help Kids with Emotional Regulation:
🧠Teach & Model Healthy Coping Skills: Explicitly teaching healthy coping skills and modeling this consistently is key to supporting kids with emotional regulation. If we expect our kids to use healthy coping skills, we need to model these skills (breathing exercises, body scan, movement, asking for help, tapping into creativity--coloring, drawing, painting, dancing, etc.)
🧠Use Mindfulness Tools: Mindfulness tools are effective in helping kids with emotional regulation because they promote self-awareness, focus, calmness, empathy, and healthy coping skills. By integrating mindfulness practices into their daily routines, kids can learn to manage their emotions more effectively, leading to improved mental and emotional well-being. There are many Mindfulness Tools that can be helpful including: Guided Breathing Cards, Feelings Poster, Windmills, Play-Dough, Bubbles, Coloring Pages, Calming Corner, to name a few!
🧠 Stay CALM: BEFORE we can consider any of these tools, the first thing we must do is REGULATE OURSELVES. This means ensuring we are taking care of ourselves. We must put our oxygen masks on before we can support anyone else. We must stay calm and share our calm with them through co-regulation. Co-regulation is the process by which a regulated adult shares their calmness with a dysregulated child.
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Need support with this? This is a large part of my job as a Peaceful Parenting Coach- I help parents stop yelling and learn effective ways to communicate with their kids so they whole family can thrive. Schedule a Free Calm Consult now!
