From infancy through adolescence, our kids need our help to understand and navigate their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, and learn how to express themselves in healthy ways. Uncertainty can create anxiety, at any age. As parents and caregivers, it’s important to talk to our kids about stressful situations in age-appropriate language, and to be calm and sensitive to help them cope.
Here are some suggestions for communicating clearly during times of stress:
Build emotional vocabulary
If your child faces a difficult situation, we must ask them how they feel about it, helping them understand, name and communicate their emotions. A good tool for this is The Wheel of Emotions (kids version or teen/adult version).
Share the facts
After listening to your child’s take on a stressful situation, calmly correct any misinformation and share age-appropriate, honest facts and feelings. Help them focus on things we can control to stay healthy, express our feelings, and help others.
Model self-care
When you need a break, communicate it and take the break, whenever possible. If you’re having a really hard time, that’s normal — parenting can be really hard, even in the best of times. Modeling good, honest communication around our feelings helps give kids an example to follow.
Stay connected
Social supports are essential to our kids’ development and the well-being of our whole family. Find ways to keep your kids connected to their friends, family, teachers, coaches, mentors, etc. — their support team. And make sure to stay connected with your support team, too!
Family journaling
Journaling is a time-honored practice of recording our thoughts, feelings, and ideas in a private space. Having a family practice can help us get in touch with our feelings individually and share them in community.
Closed Journaling
Encourage everyone in the family to keep their own journal. This doesn’t have to be just for writing — we can use drawing, collage, doodling, colors, and song lyrics to express ourselves.
Open Journaling
This is journaling shared between us and our child or teen. One of us creates an entry in the journal — writing, drawing, or whatever they’d like, then passes the journal to the other. The other contributor adds responses, creates their own entry to the journal, and then passes it back. You could also decorate a “mailbox” and write letters back and forth to each other. This type of journaling process can make it easier to communicate about things that might be hard to talk about face to face.
Color Journaling
Have your child or teen create a rainbow on the cover or first page of a notebook. Together, assign each color a mood. In the journal, draw a weekly calendar of seven squares. Each day, in addition to any journaling they may do, your child can color in one or two colors to show the major mood they experienced that day. At the end of the week or month, you can look back on the journal pages and see how things are going, and if there were any patterns or changes. This type of journaling can bring about breakthrough insights for kids, teens, and families.