Leave the Room is a fun game to play with kids and teens to help them better understand their emotions, and it’s simple to set up and play. You can play it in a one-on-one situation, but it’s most fun in a small group.

Here’s how it works:

1. Send one person out of the room (the guesser).
2. Pick an emotion and let the remaining kids (and adults) in the room know what the emotion is. You may need to help younger kids who aren’t familiar with the emotion you’ve selected.
3. Explain that everyone should act out the emotion (either with or without making sound depending on how you’re playing).
4. Have the guesser come back in the room and try to guess the emotion.

For a fun variation, tell the people acting out the emotion that they can only use their face.

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Divorce brings a multitude of change and chaos into the lives of children and with them the various emotions of divorce. That change and chaos breeds all sorts of new and strong emotions that children are often ill-equipped to deal with on their own. Many of these emotions will be entirely new to these children, and most have not developed enough to deal with them by themselves. Further compounding the problem is that many parents are also ill-equipped to help their children deal with the emotions they are experiencing because the parents are also drowning in a tidal wave of emotion.

Some of the common emotions that a child might feel related to their parents’ divorce include:

• Anger
• Anxiety
• Chaos
• Confusion
• Denial
• Depression
• Embarrassment
• Fear
• Grief
• Guilt
• Loneliness
• Loss
• Obligation
• Powerlessness
• Rejection
• Sadness
• Shock
• Stress
• Torn
• Vulnerability
• Withdrawal

Adults need to be in a position to help children to recognize and deal with the emotions that their parents’ divorce has caused to well up inside of them. Failure to deal with these emotions head on will only allow them to fester inside of the child only to boil over at some later point.

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Over time many children of divorce have a change of attitude about things. Many will get bitter and some will have attitude problems. After the initial shock of their parents being divorced, having time to process the divorce, adjusting to two homes and when the stress dies down, some children actually find joy in life.

How do they do it? How can they find joy in the midst of trials and even tribulations? In the article, The Grateful Brain we read,

“Gratitude, particularly if practiced regularly, can keep you healthier and happier.”

The article goes onto talk about misconceptions we’ve had about gratitude.

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We write a lot on Hope 4 Hurting Kids about how to how to help kids understand emotions like anger and different coping mechanism for dealing with anger. This short video from Life Noggin will help you to understand the science of anger and what happens inside your body and your brain when you’re starting to feel angry.

For more awesome resources for learning about and dealing with emotions, please visit our Hope 4 Hurting Kids Emotions Help Center.

Empathy is a critical skill for kids to develop and one of the hallmarks of emotional healing as detailed in the Grand Feelings Exit Plan (Signs of Emotional Health). The Empathy Map is a great way to get kids thinking about and understanding empathy for others. It is adapted from a business setting where it is used to understand clients but works great with kids.

Here’s What You Need

• A large sheet of paper or a board.
• Markers.
• Sticky notes.
• Pen/Pencil

Here’s How To Set Up the Empathy Map (as shown above)

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Wouldn’t it be wonderful if every little kid who had divorcing parents showed up in your class stress free? There would be no fighting, arguing or yelling. All the kids would want to be involved. They would want to form community and care for one another. The group would ooze kindness.

Impossible you say? I beg to differ. Many children who live in divorcing and stressed out families don’t know how not to be stressed. It is their way of life and, like we’ve said before, they will bring that chaos and stress with them. However, there are things we can do to alleviate some of their stress.

I want to share a few important tips I have learned down through the years.

• Always, and I mean every time, have someone at the door to greet each child and do so with a hello ritual. That might be a high-five, fist bump, hug, handshake, elbow bump or just a “Hello (insert child’s name). So glad you are joining us today.”
• Put on your most joyful face. Joy is contagious so feel free to share your joy. There is always more where it came from.
• If you don’t have a joyful face – fake it. Even faking joyful and happy feelings will help a child with a neuron-to-neuron connection. It’s called mirror neurons.
• Be prepared in advance and have everything in the room you will need and things laid out in an orderly fashion. When you leave the room, the children think you are leaving them for something more important. Nothing is more important than the children.

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Fidget Spinners are all the rage, and now Fidget Spinner Emotions will let you use a fidget spinner to help kids better understand and deal with their emotions. With kids ranging from 10 into their upper teens, I have seen first hand how they are all drawn to fidget spinners, and truth-be-told, I have a collection of them myself (though I tell people it’s only because of my work with kids).

How it works

1. Cut out the arrow pointer(s) you want to use.
2. Cut out the dotted circle and place the arrow pointer over the center of your fidget spinner. Use a piece of tape to attach it to the fidget spinner.
3. Place the fidget spinner over the gray fidget spinner outline in the middle of the emotions circle.
4. Spin the fidget spinner. When it stops, do one of the following based on the emotion the spinner lands on: Continue reading

Editors Note: We are excited to welcome Kay Westwood to our team of writers at Hope 4 Hurting Kids. We have no doubt that her experience as both a parent and a mental health practitioner will be a blessing to the Hope 4 Hurting Kids community.

Sometimes we assume that anger is the only emotion in children that needs to be listened to and addressed. Many times though, particularly with children who are hurting, it is the silence that we should be listening to.

Why do children choose silence?

If you ask a child who is going through dramatic changes in their life if they’re okay, they will most likely say “yes.” Why is this, if it’s not what they mean? It’s because: Continue reading

If you’ve ever been a parent, worked with kids, or even been around kids, you understand the importance of stuffed animals in a child’s life. I remember when my daughter was 5, she had to have her tonsils out. Her mother and I got her a purple baby doll to “keep her company” as she went into surgery. From that point on, that six-inch tall purple doll became a source of comfort to her as she faced difficult things in life. There is no doubt that stuffed animals can bring comfort to a child, but did you know that they can also provide valuable insights into what is going on in a child’s life?

Fred Roger’s once said:

Play is often talked about as if it were a relief from serious learning. But for children play is serious learning. Play is really the work of childhood.

Children talk through their play, and if you’re working with hurting young people, you need to be tuned into their play in order to understand what they are going through. Stuffed animals offer you an opportunity to get kids talking who might otherwise keep things bottled up inside.

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Children and teens live in an ever-changing world that throws more and more at them and prepares them less and less to deal with the direct impacts, the collateral damage and the emotions that follow. At Hope 4 Hurting Kids, our goal is to help these hurting children and teens move from hurt to hope and healing.

Today we announce a three stage plan to help young people understand, deal with and overcome the difficult emotional circumstances of their lives. We’re calling it:

JUMP In! STAND Strong! RISE Up!

We contemplated other names for this strategy like “Recognize, Survive and Thrive” and “Know It, Own It and Grow From It”; but in the end we settled on “Jump In! Stand Strong! Rise Up!” as a visual picture of the three stages of dealing with difficult and unpleasant emotions. Let’s have a closer look at each stage. Continue reading