Emotionally Healthy Kids

Kids have so many emotions and as they grow, they are constantly learning how to manage them. The people they learn the most from is their parents, or trusted adults. How you act and manage your emotions will be directly reflected in how your kids manage their emotions.

 

How to Gauge Your Child's Emotional Health

Are your kids experiencing “winter burnout”? Do they seem emotionally fragile? In fall 2024, we hosted a seminar by David Thomas about Raising Emotionally Healthy Kids. If you attended, you probably left with great notes and a motivation to try new things to improve the emotional health of your kids. Maybe you tried a few new ideas for a while. 

But then...life happened and the principles and strategies you were so excited to implement after the seminar get lost in the stress of daily life. Or maybe, you were not able to attend the seminar and now your kids are emotionally fragile. You feel like you are drowning and you need help knowing how to navigate through your kids and their emotions.  

Where Behavior Comes From

In this newsletter, we want to take a moment and reflect on the principles and strategies that David Thomas emphasized. The key here is to remember that kids model communication after the people they interact with regularly, especially their parents, so we encourage you to engage in these practices alongside your child.

As you walk through the list, we hope this list will motivate you to revisit, retry, or reinforce something you want to add in your parenting as you raise emotionally healthy kids. 

 

The Three R's

• RECOGNIZE how your body signals an emotional response, like the lights on the dashboard of a car.
• REGULATE by employing calming strategies to get you back from chaos to calm when you can see that your nervous system has gone into a higher state of arousal.
• REPAIR and take ownership to do the relational work needed to solve conflict. Model this to your kids the same way you teach them to ride a bike. 
   

Emotional Vocabulary

Teach your children of any age to use emotional vocabulary to name feelings with specificity. Try this feelings chart.
Model using words with appropriate intensity. For example, don't talk about feeling "depressed" if you're just a little sad. 
 

Lead By Example

Narrate your experiences of working through emotions, and model dealing with feelings of failure. Let your kids see you fail to help them learn how to embrace a growth mindset. 
 

Help with Emotions

Help your kids do the work of regulation by creating with them a physical space or a list of things that they can do to help regulate emotions in times of stress, anger, or frustration. Try adding things to the list like managing breathing, using a stress ball, running, or journaling. 
 

Emotional Health is a Journey

Remember, teaching and modeling emotional regulation doesn't happen overnight. Play the long game. Stay the course, and trust the slow, steady work of God.

We help the kids we love by first learning to regulate ourselves. Then we can model to them how to regulate our emotions like riding a bike, first with heavy assistance until you slowly take your hands off and they are able to regulate their own emotions. This process takes time, and it is never too early or late to start.

Your challenge this week is to take time to reflect on these five principles and strategies, and then take one action step in implementing them. 

Helpful Resources

If you want to go deeper into the topic of raising emotionally healthy kids here are a few resources:

Raising Boys and Girls Podcast
Raising Emotionally Strong Boys by David Thomas
Are My Kids on Track? by David Thomas
Raising Worry-Free Girls by Sissy Goff
The Worry-Free Parent by Sissy Goff

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