Breathing Exercises to Help Calm Young Children | Deborah Farmer Kris | 1 Min Read

April 28, 2021

Scream. Stomp. Slam. Quiet.

A fun morning of fort-building with her brother descended into a fight over duct tape, and my daughter fled to her room in tears. While I left her alone for a moment, I remembered a conversation I had with Dr. Marc Brackett, Director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. While adults often need wide space to recover when they are in a bad mood, he said, you always have to follow up with kids. They are still learning how to understand and manage their emotions, and it is a parent’s “moral obligation to know what your child is feeling and to support them in developing healthy strategies.”

When I knocked and walked into my daughter’s room, all of her pillows and stuffed animals had been thrown to the floor. It was a good reflection of what was happening on the inside: an emotional storm was passing through! I knew once the storm passed — and it did — I could help her talk through what had happened.

Click here to read the rest of the article.

Deborah Farmer Kris is a senior parenting columnist at Intrepid Ed News. This piece…

THIS IS PREMIUM CONTENT FOR REGISTERED USERS
Register Now
OR
You may use your member school or partner discount code !!!

Deborah Farmer Kris

A writer, teacher, parent, and child development expert, Deborah Farmer Kris writes regularly for PBS KIDS for Parents and NPR’s MindShift; her work has been featured several times in The Washington Post; and she is the author of the All the Time picture book series (coming out in 2022) focused on social-emotional growth. A popular speaker, Deborah has a B.A. in English, a B.S. in Education, and an M.Ed. in Counseling Psychology. Mostly, she loves finding and sharing nuggets of practical wisdom that can help kids and families thrive — including her own. You can follow her on Twitter @dfkris, contact her at [email protected], or visit her website: Parenthood365 (https://www.parenthood365.com/)