Learning to calm our mind when we feel anxious or overwhelmed, allows us to move from our amygdala (fight/flight/freeze/fawn) into our prefrontal cortex (logic/reasoning/regulation). Often, we can catch ourselves asking children hundreds of questions about ‘what is wrong?’ ‘what is the matter?’ ‘how do you feel?’ and notice their anxiety escalating as we draw more […]
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How do you feel? We often ask children how they feel, however many children have a small stock of responses that they can give us. Something we can commonly see, is the difficulty pulling apart the differences. Such as, the difference between sad and bored, excited and anxious, happy and content. Many feel that they
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Emotional Safety Feeling emotionally safe means that we have the freedom to feel creative, dream and explore. This means that we are in en environment that feels safe physically, emotionally and socially. Including; having people that we can trust, can be open and vulnerable, feel listened to and heard, show kindness to ourselves and others,
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My Feelings Diary Learning to recognise the nuances and unique differences in our feelings is an important component of emotional literacy development. So, we are sharing a simple feelings diary which includes some aspects of positive psychology to support children’s emotional skills development. Download here Next steps Download the feelings diary HERE Review each section
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Identifying that our feelings are fluid, and ever moving supports children to understand that they do not need to always feel ‘happy’. For so many children and adults, there is a pressure to always be ‘happy’, when in reality our feelings move continually throughout the day. Learning to differentiate between different feelings is an important
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So often, we find that children (and some adults) struggle to identify their feelings, and are unsure or do not know how to respond to them. A frequent struggle I see in my coaching work, is the challenge of differentiating boredom from sadness and stress from anger. Being able to recognise our warning signs of
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Empathy It is thought that children develop empathy around 2 years old. At this stage, children begin to show an understanding of how other people feel and recognise that they don’t feel the same way themselves. However, empathy continues to develop throughout life and as children’s brains continue to develop until around 25 years old,
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Feelings A step of emotional literacy development is being able to recognise what our emotions are. Many children can find it challenging to be able to recognise, identify and respond to their emotions, particularly the more subtle feelings. A great first step, is to encourage children to reflect on their feelings, so that they can
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Since the 2020 pandemic, there has been an increasing gap in the emotional literacy of children. One of my greatest observations from the last three years in my therapy and coaching work, is that whilst children are catching up academically: Behaviour issues are increasing Dysregulation is happening more frequently Expressing feelings is less comfortable There
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Identifying that our feelings are fluid, and ever moving supports children to understand that they do not need to always feel ‘happy’. For so many children and adults, there is a pressure to always be ‘happy’, when in reality our feelings move continually throughout the day. So, in this article, we share a feelings diary
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