Balancing Your Child’s Emotions

(whimsical music) Headspace is here to help kids and families show their mind some love. It's time to take a breather. (whimsical music) Hi and welcome to Headspace Breathers. I'm Samantha, a Kids and Family Mindfulness Expert. Every day life sometimes feels like a balancing act and that impacts how you and your child feel at any given time. Recognizing those emotions can be a powerful tool for managing them and being able to say how you're feeling in all kinds of situations keeps you from negative storylines through your head. But more importantly, it can help you accept the present moment and balance your responses to it. So let's see if we can't make the balancing act feel a little bit smoother. We asked young Headspacers what has been tough about being in quarantine. The most difficult part is that I wasn't able to see my new classmates or get to see my teacher in-person. That's one thing that I miss, not being able to go to school. I miss my best friend, Holly. We would have like play dates like all the time. But now, we can't. Here are some hands-on exercises to help your child understand and practice balancing emotions. Younger children enjoy an activity that we call the fishbowl feeling practice. In this practice, try writing or drawing feelings such as sad, angry, confused, or cozy then place them in a bowl and take turns telling stories of times that you felt that way. All right, so it's nice to meet you both. So I wanted to talk a little bit about feelings. I brought this bowl and we put some feelings in here. So I'm gonna tell you a little tiny story when I felt this way and then I want you to guess what the feeling is. All right, so I'm gonna pick one here and oh, I have a good one, okay. So I felt this way when I was all alone and I couldn't see my friends for a really long time. That made me feel this way. Can you guess the feeling? Sad! Close! It says lonely, yeah. Do you ever feel lonely? Yeah. What makes you feel lonely sometimes? When it's nighttime. When it's nighttime, yeah. So our feelings are like that, right? When I'm really, really worried, I might cry, I might not be able to sleep. It's like that, kind of like that word you feel sometimes. Try to connect feelings to specific experiences that your children have had including positive and negative situations. This will help them to identify feelings when they arise and to manage them more easily. What are some difficult emotions that come up for you? It's not very easy for me to get to sleep sometimes. I miss my granny, because I miss going to her house and spending the night over there and I love her so much. Honestly, my grandparents, my dad. 'Cause it's been hard without them, 'cause they're like major...