Mindfulness and Regulation
Mindfulness and Regulation at School
Practicing mindfulness is an essential part of learning to regulate your emotions. The mistake many people make is waiting until a child (or adult!) is upset before encouraging them to practice these skills. Like anything else, being mindful and regulating your body is a skill that takes a lot of practice! The best time to practice mindfulness is when you are regulated and calm. It will be much easier to encourage your child (or yourself) to use these mindfulness techniques.
We take lots of opportunities at school to practice mindfulness. Many of our students begin their day with a group mindfulness activity as part of their morning meeting each morning. We teach many different mindfulness activities that they can practice at school or home whenever they need it. The peace corner, or quiet corner, is always available to our children to get some space away from their friends to practice these skills.
Practice Mindfulness at Home
Developing a mindfulness practice at home is beneficial for children and parents! There are so many ways to incorporate mindfulness into your daily routines. Each of the activities suggested below can easily be incorporated into your morning or bedtime routine or done in the car!
The Color Game: Pick any color and set a timer. Depending on your child’s age and ability to focus, the timer can be set for anywhere from 1 minute to 5 minutes. During this time, you and your child should think of and name, or write down, as many things you can that are that color.
Box Breathing: Box breathing is a technique that many of our BRMS children have learned at circle time! There are many different ways to encourage your child to take deep breaths, but this is easy to remember. To take box breaths, you take a deep breath in through your nose for 4 seconds, hold the breath in for 4 seconds, slowly exhale through your mouth for 4 seconds, and finally hold your breath out for 4 seconds. This should be repeated four times!
Here is a link to a video I created with my daughter showing how to do box breathing!
Progressive Muscle Relaxation: This is one of my children’s favorite ways to practice mindfulness! You lay on the floor or your bed and slowly go through each area of your body and breathe in as you tense those muscles, and then breathe out as you relax them. There are lots of different guided relaxation resources available on Amazon and even Youtube. The Angry Octopus is a Progressive Muscle Relaxation story for kids that I use frequently! You can buy it as a book or play a read-aloud video of it on YouTube.
The Angry Octopus | Read Aloud
Additional mindfulness activities to do as a family:
https://www.parents.com/fun/activities/5-mindfulness-activities-you-can-do-as-a-family/
https://www.zerotothree.org/resources/3406-mindfulness-practices-for-families
Mindfulness and Regulation for Infants and Toddlers
If your child isn’t quite ready for the activities above, you can still introduce them to the concepts of mindfulness and regulation! There are several ways that we do this at school that you can do at home too!
Teaching About Emotions: We use books and picture cards that show children’s faces and teach them the names for different emotions. This gives them the language to express how they are feeling. We then help them connect that language to their own emotions by narrating events and identifying what they might be feeling in that moment. We can also model this as adults when we are frustrated, angry, or sad.
Here are some books that you can use at home!
https://www.amazon.com/Making-Faces-First-Book-Emotions/dp/1419723839
https://www.amazon.com/Feelings-Shelley-Rotners-Childhood-Paperback/dp/0761323775
Teaching About Regulation: For a child feeling sad, angry, or overwhelmed, we introduce the idea of using deep breathing to regulate by modeling it for them. Depending on what the child needs at the moment, we either pick them up and hold them, or sit in front of them. Then we take deep breaths, exaggerating them at first to help them see what we are doing. Breath in through the nose and out through the mouth. Just like babies and toddlers like to copy the faces and sounds that we make, they can also learn to copy our deep breathing when upset! We can model this as adults when we are upset too!
Additional Resources for infants and toddlers:
https://challengingbehavior.cbcs.usf.edu/docs/TeachingYourChild_feelings.pdf