Four Ways To Help Children Cope With Emotion

Are you looking for some information on helping your children cope with their emotion? Here's my personal and work experience on this topic. Some parents find it challenging to help their children to cope with their emotion. The following ways may help your children cope with their emotion:

1. Playing Games

   You may introduce emotions e.g. happy, sad, upset, disappointed, hurt, sad, excited, angry, scared and so on to your children. When they know the different names of emotion, it helps them to identify emotion.
   You can design a simple feeling wheel game to teach them some basic feelings. Then, you and your children can take turn to throw the dice and reach one of the feelings.

   • Game One

     It uses non-verbal expression facial express and gesture to express feelings.

   • Game Two

     It helps a child understand his or her feelings, the situations that trigger those feelings. For example, I feel sad (or other feelings) when my brother hurts me.

   • Game Three

     It helps to find ways to cope with different feelings. For example, when I feel sad, I shall talk to my mother or hug my teddy bear. Most children love to play this game. It helps them to express their feelings and find some ways of coping with them. Adults shall play along to help children learn to cope with their emotions.

2. Drawing

   It is a good way to encourage your children to express their feelings through drawing. It is safe and creates a way to help children release their emotion. After drawing, they have released most of their emotion and energy. When they have slowly calmed down, you can start to process with them about their feelings. You may ask them what was happening and practise attending, listening and responding skills.

3. Talking

   Some of the children are more verbal and they may prefer to talk about the incident and feelings. You may use the rapport building, attending, listening and responding skills to help you children. Be an encouraging and active listener. If parents are critical or judgmental, it may affect their relationship with their children.

4. Role Play and Modeling

   Some children prefer more indirect way of cope with their emotion. Role-play is the best way to help them. You can play their building blocks with people or animals. You invite your children to act out certain situation or emotion that your children may find it hard to handle.
   
   Through role-play, you can introduce and show different emotion coping strategies, like relaxing skills, counting exercise, breathing exercise and distraction techniques. Your children can practise different emotional coping strategies through role-play. This way may be creative and non-intrusive for the children.

In conclusion, playing games, drawing, talking and role-playing are the creative and effective ways to help your children cope with their emotions. I hope that you've earned a wealth of knowledge on how to help children cope with their emotion. I wish that you would put the knowledge into practice and share your experience with others.