• Firstly, Children’s own needs have to be met before they can meet other’s needs
• Children must have positive, nurturing relationships with the important people in their lives. Challenging relationships can cause stress for children and toxic stress can cause great challenges for children to understand and manage their own emotions.
• Emotional understanding is an innate maturation process that is fostered within a social setting such as helping children to recognise the physiological component of the emotion (what is happening in their bodies) while labelling their emotions for them.
• Play allows children to experience and express different emotions, and to externalise the internalised. Encourage play in all its forms.
• Children need to be able to discuss any issues that arise that they are scared or unsure about. Creating space for communication is KEY so they feel heard, that they don’t have to carry the emotion alone, and that they trust they will be listened to if they open up.
• When they see emotional literate adults around them who are identifying, using and managing their own emotions in a healthy way.
• Give children the language to express themselves through modelling use of it, introducing words around emotion in story books and specific books that address emotions (see blog on therapeutic stories) and discussing emotions at home.
• Children should be encouraged to express all emotions, they should not be sheltered from what you perceive as “not good”, even anger. Anger is an important emotion, however how it is expressed is important, there are healthy ways to express anger and unhealthy ways-help children see the difference between the two. Emotions can be seen as messengers, telling us something.
• Remember: understanding and respecting children’s emotions is not a softly softly approach- it is giving them the chance to understand the totality of their experience.

Let’s Talk About It

Do you have a creative way of teaching your children that emotional literacy is important?

Those who are emotionally intelligent are able to understand themselves and if they have an issue with something and consequently be more aware of how to work through this. They tend to be aware of their intentions and their responses to situations. There are also competent and understanding others feelings and be able to manage relationships well.

The specific skills that somebody who is emotionally literate has include the ability to identify emotions, understand them, use them and manage them.

Identify

Understand

– Combine such as anger and disgust form contempt

– Progress such as annoyance changing into anger and then into rage

– Transition from one to another

– Ambiguity such as feeling annoyance and love at the same time

This skill answers such questions as:

Why am I feeling anxious

If I say this to my friend, how will he feel;

What will happen if I say that to her?

Use

Manage

Let’s Talk About It

Do you have a creative way of teaching your children that emotional literacy is important?

Your children adore you!

Even though they prance around acting like the master, you the parent are in fact the god. When they are small they just want to play with you endlessly.

As they grow older their interests change and how they play changes, but they still want your attention and time. Who they are and their sense of who they are is reflected back at them through you and how you engage and spend time with them.

Make the time, Play with them.

You will always be their favourite toy!

Let’s Talk About It

Share your experience, tell us how your relationship with your kids have grown as they grow up? 

This is a common question I hear. This can be answered a number of ways however from my perspective there are certain things that we are aware of that increase levels of anxiety.

First of all it is important to point out that anxiety in small quantities is good for us as it propels us to move and act. However high levels of anxiety can be crippling as they can stop us from acting. Prolonged anxiety can have a detrimental effect on our thought patterns but also on our physical health due to suppression of the immune system when our fight or flight response is on all the time.

Let’s look at what types of things cause anxiety.

• Anxiety is a learned behaviour, if parents are anxious then children see this as a template for their own behaviour.
• For those of us who are in a situation where we are in physical danger or in danger of neglect, anxiety can become a way of life. Unpredictable situations make people anxious because they cannot be sure of what is going to happen.
• Having a high level of choice is anxiety provoking-once we choose what we want, we are often in a state of anxiety regarding the things that we didn’t choose.
• The increased availability of news and information, mostly negative that is constantly being fed to us through the news and social media channels create a sense that the world is a very dangerous place. The feeling of safety is the number one human need and we are constantly evaluating its status.
• Contemporary science has indicated the direct connection between the gut and the brain via the vagus nerve. This means that many of the (processed) foods that we eat do not complement our biological make up and lead to a range of stomach and constipation issues. This level of discomfort and the toxins produced from the foods in our stomachs is communicated to the brain via the vagus nerve and can lead to high levels of anxiety.

Let’s Talk About It

What causes anxiety in your home and then your children?

Parenting children and getting them to comply with your requests is playing a long game. It can be thought of as running a marathon, not a sprint. If you could imagine a friend daring you to “Do/say the same thing over and over, sometimes 10 times a day (or more) for months on end, while keeping an even tone” -That’s parenting! When you play a long game, the result you desire is a long way off, but is very much there.

 Be patient, be consistent and one day, much to your surprise, they are doing as you hope…..seemlessly! Reflect with your partner or friend about what your child used not to do but now does, or something they didn’t do and now they do it. Give yourself a clap on the back, that was because of your endless repetition of the same message.

 Wouldn’t it be lovely if humans were intrinsically motivated to do the things we want them to do? I hear lots of frustrations from parents such as “He should just clean his room because it’s good to have a clean room” or “She should eat her dinner because it’s healthy and she should not need a treat to get her to eat it”. So why are they not just motivated to do as we ask. There are a couple of reasons

We raise our children in a continuously evolving reward based system that we create and then get annoyed with

We know that the way to help children learn what we value and what we want them to repeat is by showing them which behaviours we value it and then they repeat the behaviour so they will get the reward again. This starts with verbally praising their regular achievements when they are teeny tiny babies.We have to praise them because they need feedback to know what they are doing right. Without feedback (in the form of praise or object) they can feel lost about what is the right thing to do and this can lead to self esteem* issues. As they continue to grow, a mix of verbal praise and objects are used to motivate and complete tasks.

However as they grow and their brain evolves and becomes more sophisticated (which we want)-they see all the cool stuff around them (sweets, treats, TV, screens and simultaneously there are more reasons to get distracted from the task at hand. We then begin to give them something other than verbal praise(see the table below for some of them) to get them to do the thing we want them to do.

We model for them that we like and value the reward system by doing things like

What is really interesting about this system is that, as adults, we think we are not subject to it when in fact, we are slaves to the same system. We feel hard done by if we have put in lots of work with little reward (like parenting can feel), if our endless parenting is not acknowledged by our partner, if our toil at work is not noticed by our employer. We need the praise and reward just as much as the kids do, meaning we are modelling that we need and value the system.

When our kids are babies, they can’t physically or mentally understand why any given task needs to be done-and so we do it for them. As a consequence, they instantly know how it feels to have others do things for them to have their needs met. This continues for the at least the first 3 years of their life so when parents begin to give the independence of doing the task themselves, back  over to the child they are like ”Hey, I’m not doing that, you do”. And so the battle begins.

Humans just respond to their environment, so if we start off praising them and them giving them objects(including screen time) then the human mind learns to understand that how system works.

 My experience is that there are a limited number of behaviours which humans are intrinsically motivated to engage in, everything else is part of a long game.

*Self esteem is like a windscreen, small cracks make it week and more likely to shatter.

** Extreme caution should be used when using anything that costs money as a motivator. You don’t know how long you have to use rewards with your child so using rewards that are money based (a trip to Smyth without a specific amount of money to be spent) can be expensive and difficult to maintain so they often don’t work in the long term. Also if you have other children, it can be seen as unfair.

Let’s Talk About It

What do you find yourself repeating to your children more than 10 times a day?