Promoting resilience and wellbeing

  If you have more then one child the chances are you often feel like a referee in your own home.   We know that even the most loving siblings still have moments of intense feelings with one another.   Our children fight for all sorts of reasons – not enough hot water left in the shower, someone has eaten the last slice of bread, someone has to sit in the middle seat of the car – pretty much as soon as you move from a one child family all families experience this to a greater or lesser degree. One way to look at this is around scarcity and survival.   Instinctual competition is hardwired into human survival and when there are more children than adults around (and even when there isn’t) this can create competition for attention and resources and leave our children less able to experience empathy - we are all so much better at empathy when we are not worried about getting our own needs met.   But whether it’s fighting over the shower, or maybe the attention of...

  All children (and all adults!) experience big feelings.  And these big feelings can take on all sorts of different guises.  Sometimes the feelings show up as very loud and noisy tantrums and sometimes they are so quiet that we need to look much more closely not to miss them, like sadness that hangs around for much longer than it should. The thing about these big feelings is that they are perfectly normal to feel and actually the main reason these feelings end up bursting out in all sorts of tricky behaviours is because our little people don’t know how to manage them yet .  Emotional regulation is not something any of us are born with, it is something that we develop and this is where we come in.  One of the most important jobs as a parent or carer is to support our children to manage these big normal feelings in ways that are healthy and adaptive.  Understanding the science (Dan Siegel)   Ok here is where I need you to use your imagination a little b...