As we can't go outside, let's look inside instead
This period of isolation is an opportunity, as well as feeling like an obligation: An opportunity to help your child relate more skillfully to their internal worlds.
Can your child bring their incredible sense of adventure and curiosity to their internal emotional worlds?
A great place to start is to think about emotions as energy in motion. They start in the body first and then our mind gives them a name.
Can you think of as many emotions as possible and give them names? Anger, sadness, joy are often the first that come to mind, but can your name any more?
Using a copy of the body outline resource below, see if you can map where you feel these emotions in your body. For example, we might notice a change in our tummy when we are frightened.
Using a different colour for each of the main emotions, see if you can map them on your body outline. For example, you might use red for anger, green for joy and purple for excitement.
Research on emotions and how they map onto the body is really interesting for children and adults alike.
Take a look at this emotions map and see if the areas of bodily arousal shown match those of your own body map.
It is so important that children learn to see emotions as an important and inevitable part of being human. We cannot control them (most of us try daily to do so!) and yet we are often not willing to experience all of them, just the ones we view as :positive", such as happiness and pride.
