JR Mindful Parenting

Helping kids put their feelings into words (affect labeling) can help them better navigate strong, negative emotional experiences. We tend to "keep it simple" when talking about feelings with young children and may often stick to the basics, such as mad, glad and sad. That is all well and good. Once our children have mastered that, we can move on to a bigger variety of emotionally descriptive words. We can increase our child's understanding of a bigger expanse of feelings by broadening the terms we use. Stumped about what feeling words to use beyond the three aforementioned? Try some of these on for size... Why it Matters: We've long thought that naming our feelings could help us manage negative emotional states, but we weren't quite sure how exactly this worked. Brain imaging in the past demonstrated a possible neural pathway for this process, but a definitive conclusion could not be made. By using a functional magnetic resonance imaging study, scientists were ab...

Click to read full article :  Self Compassion In the course of their lives, children face innumerable losses, challenges, heartbreaks and disappointments. Children’s resilience depends, in part, on the quality of their relationships with themselves. In other words, how well children persevere through adversity appears to be strongly associated with their ability to relate to themselves with kindness and compassion.

7 Positive Childhood Experiences 1. Ability to talk with family about feelings. 2. Felt experience that family is supportive in difficult times. 3. Enjoyment in participation in community traditions. 4. Feeling of belonging in high school. 5. Feeling of being supported by friends. 6. Having at least two non-parent adults who genuinely care. 7. Feeling safe and protected by an adult at home.

Parenting kids in the tween years brings many wonderful and many challenging experiences. The ups and downs of tween’s behavior is legendary (it’s the stuff you can remind them when their children reach this age). However, when their energy and mood fluctuations start to upset your balance, it’s time to consciously work on staying present and nonreactive. Let’s look at some common ways in which parents leave the state of calm presence and enter a more frazzled or disrupted emotional state with their kids. You become too entwined in their moods To be helpful to your tween, understand the difference between empathy and compassion. With empathy, you can actually feel another’s pain or suffering. That’s because empathy activates areas of your brain to mirror the other person’s feelings and responses to their triggers. Although it’s a noble trait, too much empathy with your child can lead you toward intense distress of your own.   The alternative – remaining compassionate and at peace C...