Episode 43 – Strengthening Emotional Wellbeing PART 2

In our previous chat with Julia Pappas, we talked about what emotions are, what emotional development is, and how we regulate emotions. We’ve learned that our ability to acknowledge, express, and regulate emotion is a very crucial life skill and fortunately, as parents, we can teach this skill to our children. In this episode, we’re diving a bit deeper and discussing how to strengthen emotional wellbeing. We tackle specific strategies and tools that we can use to nurture that strength in our children, such as building emotional vocabulary, storytelling, simple observation, and so many more.

Julia Pappas is a psychologist and parent coach. She has over 15 years of experience working with parents and their children and has particular expertise in child development, behaviour regulation, and learning needs. Julia believes in the power of parents to change the world by being the best resource, inspiration, and support they can be to their children. She empowers parents to own their mission, to discover limiting beliefs and parenting blocks and she helps develop essential skills so that parents can have the most fulfilling years of their life while raising children.

Key Learnings

Tune in to our conversation as we talk about:

• How strengthening emotional wellbeing forms a lot of Julia’s work
• Common issues parents have when dealing with their child’s emotional wellbeing
• How emotions might translate into behaviors when the child’s needs are not met
• What is emotional wellbeing?
• How parents can feel best supported, less overwhelmed and less pressured to be a good parent
• What skills are needed to strengthen our child’s emotional wellbeing
• Real-life examples of situations wherein a child may still not have developed the skills needed for emotional wellbeing and how we can best respond to them
• Steps in nurturing that strength in our children and tools we can use for teaching, regulating and communicating

Tips on How to Nurture Emotional Wellbeing in Children:

1. Be observant. Whenever you are noticing a negative behaviour or the way a specific emotion is expressed, write that out. This is what Im seeing; this is a challenge. Then flip it into, This is what I would like to see instead. 
2. Be specific about the skills you want your child to learn. Ask yourself, What would I like my child to be able to do, to express, to show? And how can I teach that?
3. Understand what your child is trying to communicate. Remember that emotions and behaviour are devices to communicate a need.
4. Knowing ourselves as parents, how we process emotions, and how we support our own emotional wellbeing will help us in guiding that process in teaching and modelling to the child.

Quotes

“Children learn best from other human beings, especially if those other people are people they have relationships with.”

“Emotion is kind of like poop or pee – it just comes out. It’s just biologically necessary and it comes out of a child. Sometimes they don’t know what to do with it, so they look at us and go, “Oh, I have all of this happening to me, I don’t know what it is, it’s all over me!” It’s up to us to say, “Yes, those are feelings, you are scared, you are happy, and it’s totally okay! There’s a way to clean that up and regulate that.””

Links

• Julia’s website – https://juliapappas.co/
• The Parenting Presence Podcast – https://juliapappas.co/podcast/
• Kisses in Your Hear: https://chataboutchildren.com/products/

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