Chelsea explains how mindfulness can help kids manage big feelings and build emotional resilience. She shares practical exercises like mindful breathing, grounding techniques, and positive affirmations to support your child's well-being.
Chelsea explains how mindfulness can help kids manage big feelings and build emotional resilience. She shares practical exercises like mindful breathing, grounding techniques, and positive affirmations to support your child's well-being.
Project Parenthood is hosted by Chelsea Dorcich. A transcript is available as Simplecast.
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Our minds are trainable and tame-able. As parents, we can teach our children that they are co creators of their reality. We can help them live an empowered life and set them up for success. When we approach mindfulness with our kids, we teach our kids to naturally be in tune to their bodies, bringing them back into their sensations in the present moment.
When we teach our kids mindfulness, we inherently teach them to be more open to learning, more curious. And we're open to sensing and feeling.
Hi, welcome back to Project Parenthood. I am your host, Chelsea Dorcich, Licensed Marriage Family Therapist. I am here to join you on your conscious parenting journey, bringing more curiosity, openness, acceptance, kindness, and non judgment along the way. My goal is for us to accept what is out of our control, commit to improving our parenting life, and discover better outcomes for ourselves and our family.
Mindfulness. Mindfulness refers to a set of psychological skills for effective living. Mindfulness involves paying attention with flexibility. Openness, curiosity, and kindness. It's a diverse set of skills, and the goal is to cultivate flexible attention, which can mean broadening, narrowing, sustaining, shifting our attention to different aspects of the here and now.
Mindfulness's strongest qualities are openness, curiosity, and kindness. Our goal with mindfulness is not to control how we feel but actually open up and make room for difficult feelings and allow them to be as they are. Our goal with mindfulness and doing mindful exercises with children is to bring more presence and more focus, allowing our children to learn to navigate difficult feelings without the feelings carrying them away.
Mindfulness can help our children avoid shutting down or freezing up, engaging in self defeating behavior. worrying, ruminating, or getting stuck. Let's talk about mindfulness exercises for kids. Number one strategy is breathing. Breathing gives us an ability to focus and take control. It can regulate our nervous system and increase our ability to regulate ourselves.
Breathing can be fun for kids. You can make it into hot cocoa breathing where you're smelling the hot cocoa, and then you're blowing on it to cool it down. Or you can do the same with a bowl of soup or blowing out birthday cakes, blowing up a balloon. There is shape of breathing, like figure eight. Or you can trace the figure 8, inhaling one direction, exhaling another direction, and you can do that with any shape, square, triangle, star, and just alternating between the exhales, and potentially even holding your breath for a second when you get to the point of a star or the corner of a square.
I recommend encouraging your children to make up their own breathing exercises and tie it into their interest. So it can be. Anything from a rainbow breathing or a unicorn breath or superhero breaths like a Spider Man or a Hulk breath. There's flower breathing and the beauty of our children not only making up their own breathing exercises, it empowers them.
They're more likely to come back to that when disregulated, but it can also be a code word for us adults. So. Just as we don't wanna hear, calm down or take a breath when we're upset or dysregulated. This is a surefire way to just subtly say, show me your Spider-Man breath. Or even just saying Spider-Man or Rainbow, whatever it is.
Grounding exercises, help to regulate and bring us back to the present moment. Going through the five senses is a great grounding exercise. It's, you can name one thing for each sense or just focus on, hey. Tell me two things you see. Tell me two things you hear. Or what are you noticing about this room right now?
It's a great, what we might call, redirect, but it's just also grounding our children and bringing them back to what's right in front of them. Dropping anchor is a form of grounding, and the analogy is, which, What might work better for kids is if you were climbing a tree, maybe even in a treehouse and a storm came in, you wouldn't stay up there.
You would want to climb down to the ground and feel a little bit more secure. So climbing down and getting out of the treehouse or the tree doesn't make the storm go away, but it makes you stronger and more able to ride out the storm. It's the same with a boat analogy where a boat will drop its anchor or tie itself to the dock when a storm comes.
Does not make the storm go away, but the ship is able to brave the storm better. So our goal with mindfulness and grounding and breathing is to help our children brave that storm of feelings or thoughts or memories that are coming up for them. We want to teach our children Not to avoid or struggle or resist some of those bigger feelings, but to learn over time to accept them and use their energy to tap into skills to regulate.
Guided imagery is another way to tap kids into grounding and mindfulness and think of this as a, this too shall pass. So children can imagine leaves on a string, clouds in the sky, or cars on a road and their overwhelming feelings or their thoughts or those memories are those leaves, clouds, or cars, and they can imagine them traveling by and they might occasionally get stuck on the creek or stuck in traffic, but they will eventually pass and move on.
Teaching our children. To let the thoughts and feelings that don't align with their values or are not helpful. We want those feelings, those thoughts, those memories to get on the train and leave or float on by like a cloud or a leaf on the stream. Let it keep going. Image substitution is replacing the current situation with a more desirable, calmer visualization to help ground your child and reset them to work through the problem.
So maybe they're having anxiety or some worry or they're ruminating, they're stuck and they're feeling it in their stomach. So maybe they can see it. start to picture their stomach as a more calm stream or a puddle of water that's just sitting there instead of this rushing waterfall that it might feel like right now.
Having mantras or positive affirmations are helpful where kids can say things that bring them back to the present. It can be something as simple as, Focus, or look at what's in front of you, or you are safe. Your heart is your superpower. You got this. I am strong. I am able and finding words or phrases that resonate with them.
If they choose a mantra, a positive affirmation, they can even write it on a card or a piece of paper and decorate it and hang it up in their room or the bathroom or somewhere where they'll pass by it every day and have that reminder. Having a figurative, happy place. It's something I do with a lot of patients and we'll talk about and even draw and write it out what that happy place looks like and involving all five senses.
So when you're happy place, what do you see? What do you hear? What do you feel? Are there any smells that you enjoy? What are you tasting? Maybe they're drinking something or eating something that brings them pleasure. And our goal is not for our kids to avoid what's going on in that moment by going here, but it's, it's.
It's a grounding exercise. So where they can come here to this happy place, even if it's for 30 seconds, 15 seconds, then reset their breath. And then they come back to what is in front of them, but their nervous system more regulated, they're more calm and they're able to navigate that situation better.
Reading books, drawing and coloring are all great ways to get grounded and reset. So having those on hand, especially when you're out and about with a lot of transitions with younger kids. It's nice to have those. to help, yes, keep their attention, but to even its grounding. I want to end today with a few exercises and acronyms from a mindfulness teacher, Roma Khetarpal.
For your two to six year olds, think of the acronym SPOT. So you spot what you're feeling, you say it, and then you okay it. So it's awareness. And then acknowledging and then giving permission for that feeling without judgment. Six to twelve year olds think of the acronym STOP. So you're slowing down, you're taking a break or a breath, you observe what is going on, and then you proceed.
So you sit with it. We slow down. What's really going on? Is there something underneath? Like, am I just really hungry or am I just really tired? So that's that stop. For 12 year olds and older, think of the acronym RAIN. So you're recognizing, you're accepting, you're investigating, then you're nurturing. So these can all be written out.
They can be practiced. And ideally you're practicing mindfulness five minutes a day, put a timer on it, and it's just a moment for. You, your body and your presence. So your child, whether you guys are doing this together, whether you're incorporating it in your busy routine, whether it's two minutes in the morning, a minute in the middle of the day, two minutes at the end, or if it's five altogether, that's it for this week's edition of project parenthood, remember to be curious, open, accepting, kind, and nonjudgmental on your conscious parenting journey.
If you have any questions about this episode, about your parenting journey and or topics you'd like to hear more about, please reach out to Parenthood@quickanddirtytips.com or leave a message at 646-926-3243. Project Parenthood is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast. Thanks to the team at Quick and Dirty Tips, Holly Hutchings, Davina Tomlin, Morgan Christianson and Brannan Goetschius.
May you be happy, safe and protected, healthy and strong, and live with ease.