Anti-bullying Week – Talking about feelings for self-regulation
Today is the third day of Anti-Bullying Week and here at Hamish & Milo we are thinking about how the expression of feelings is key to our wellbeing.
Helping children to notice, recognise and begin to express how they’re feeling allows them to develop key emotional literacy skills such as self-awareness and self-regulation, which are vital for their emotional and social development.
Acknowledging that all emotions are valid and needed for us to be emotionally healthy, is a key part of the Hamish & Milo Wellbeing Intervention Programme. We avoid ever referring to emotions as negative, but instead acknowledge that some emotions can feel uncomfortable – but they are all valid, help us to recognise our experiences and help us to communicate our needs.
All children need multiple, repeated experiences of empathic adults noticing, labelling and validating their emotions in a safe, relational way; these experiences reinforce and acknowledge to the child that all feelings are acceptable and safe to have.
“This empathic engagement with a child enables a ‘felt’ sense of being understood and activates changes in the child’s neurological system allowing them to calm down, physiologically and psychologically.”
Clare Williams, Hamish & Milo Author
Children need consistent experiences of feeling heard and valued by trusted and empathetic adults so they can begin to regulate themselves.
Self-regulation can only happen if they’ve had enough experience of being soothed, regulated and helped to name their emotions by these significant adults.
Spending time talking together is also an invaluable element of emotion coaching – exploring what our emotions are, how they present and how we can begin to make sense of them.
The Hamish & Milo Sensation and Emotion Cards help children to recognise, communicate and express their feelings by developing their emotional awareness and vocabulary. The cards can be used with individual children or with groups of children and are a useful tool to open up conversations, validate experiences and allow curiosity in exploring a range of feelings, emotions and the context of experiences.
Creating an emotions story activity
As a great exercise for Anti-Bullying Week, and encouraging the children to think about the expression of feelings and wellbeing ask your children to create an emotions story.
