Begin Teaching Your Child Coping Skills

Big behaviors come with big feelings. Helping your child learn to identify their feelings, big or small, and where they feel them is the first step in teaching effective coping skills.

Start with daily practice during times where they seem most cool, calm, and collected. Ask them how they are feeling in the moment. Communicate how you are feeling and provide different emotions they could be feeling, in the moment. This can help your child begin to label their feelings. Initially avoid practicing this during times they are having big behaviors. These are times when learning a new skill can be very difficult to achieve.

Second, ask your child what color and items they connect with that feeling. For example, if they are feeling happy this could associate with yellow and warm like the sun.  Or when they are feeling calm this connects with violet or purple, and a fluffy cloud. This will be different for each individual and family. We all experience colors and the things around us differently through our lived experiences, culture, age, etc.

Third, have them identify how and where they feel this in their body. For children who are visual learners have them act out how they feel such as dancing or making a silly face.

The layout will be Identify Feeling > Associations (color, objects) > Body. Applying it all together could be as follows: for example, when we feel happy-yellow-sun-warm-dancing; silly-orange-silly face-laughing; proud-purple-strong.

Take some time with your child to write down or utilize the color wheel below to begin practicing. After practicing this regularly with your child, start to work-in the big feelings: mad, frustrated, embarrassed, sad, scared. If this practice causes your child to get upset, remember to take it one day, week, or one feeling at a time. Always attempt to practice before big feelings occur.

For parents who like to know the why – why is this important?  How does this relate to decreasing meltdowns? Emotions and feelings are felt in our bodies. Behaviors and how someone acts/behaves are a result of those feelings. We experience feelings physically in the body through our nervous system. First we work to recognize our feelings, how we experience them, and where we feel them in our body. Then we can begin to use coping skills.

Image taken by Jenny Lumley at Wilderness State Park in Michigan.