In the past, we have discussed the importance of helping young people to name and understand their emotions using the Super Simple Feelings Management Technique. We have also discussed the importance of helping them to build a tool box of coping skills by discussing Please Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff.

So, how do we know when these tools are working? That is why at Hope 4 Hurting Kids we’ve developed the

Grand Feelings Exit Plan

The Grand Feelings Exit Plan helps a young person to know the signs that they have truly dealt with and moved past a difficult emotion or circumstance. Like the Super Simple Feelings Management Technique and Please Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff, the Grand Feelings Exit Plan is a mnemonic to help young people, and the adults who care for them, to remember the four signs of emotional healing. Let’s have a look at each sign. Continue reading

The first step in helping kids (or anyone for that matter) to deal with and process the difficult emotions in their lives is to help them understand and name emotions. At Hope 4 Hurting Kids, we use the Super Simple Feelings Management Technique for that. Once we have helped kids to understand their emotions, we need to provide them with means for dealing with those emotions.

The second step towards emotional maturity and healing is to develop a robust set of coping skills. Coping Skills are designed to help “take the edge” of emotions and assist us in dealing with them. Unfortunately, that moment when a young person is drowning in emotions is not the right time to start thinking about coping mechanisms. Instead, it is important that kids and teens have at their disposal a tool box full of coping mechanisms that work for them that they can draw from in a time of crisis.

At Hope 4 Hurting Kids, we’ve developed another mnemonic to help keep track of the many different types of coping mechanism. This time we borrowed from the title of a popular book series by Richard Carlson. The different types of coping skills can be readily recalled by remembering the phrase:

Please Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff

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Feelings pong is a fun game to play and easy to set up – all you need is a table some cups and ping-pong ball. It is another great activity to use with the Super Simple Feelings Management Technique to help kids and teens to better understand and deal with the emotions they face.

Here’s what you need:

1. Plastic cups (9, 13, 18 or 24 cups work best for a pyramid). We used multi-colored cups so each color represented a group of emotions but that isn’t necessary for the game.
2. Ping-Pong balls.
3. Permanent Marker.

Here’s how it works. Continue reading

Many of the resources and articles you see here on Hope 4 Hurting Kids include ideas and activities for teaching kids to better understand and deal with the difficult emotions that they face in life. To accomplish that goal, we suggest five main strategies to help kids to better recognize, understand and process their emotions. These five skills are represented by the letters SSFMT and the mneumonic:

Super Simple Feelings Management Technique

Here what each letter represents:

S(uper) – See It

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This great video from Learning Time Fun Jr. helps young kids (think toddlers through early elementary aged) to learn feelings and emotions by encouraging them to look at the characters’ faces and repeat the emotion.

This is an awesome tool to help younger kids begin to develop the emotions vocabulary that will serve them so well later in life if, and when, they face difficult circumstances.

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

This video from Sentis is part of a series of videos that explore how the brain works. This installment examines emotions and the brain in language that is very easy to understand.

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

The Feelings Parking Lot is a great tool to use with kids to both identify the feelings they are experiencing and to discuss different coping mechanisms that can help with those emotions. On top of that, it’s always fun to play with Matchbox Cars.

Here’s how to build it:

1. On a large piece of paper, poster board or foam board, draw a series of lines on either side to create “parking spaces.” Leave some space between the space for a driving area. Have fun decorating your parking area.
2. On one side of the parking lot, write the name of one emotion in each parking space. We also includes a simple emoji for each emotion to help younger kids who may not be able to read the emotion names (a list of the emotion names we used is included below, but you can use whatever emotions you want to include).
3. On the other side, write various coping mechanisms kids can use to deal with difficult emotions (again, the list of coping tools we used are listed below). Depending on how artistic you are, feel free to draw pictures representing the coping skill to help younger kids.

You can use the feelings parking lot one-on-one with an individual child, leave it out as an emotional “check in” for a group of kids at the beginning of a class or group with an adult to talk through the process, or just leave it out for the kids to explore and play with themselves.

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This miniature book about feelings for kids is called “My Book About Feelings” and comes to us from Scholastic.com.  That’s right, the people known for school book fairs and those book order forms that your kids bring home all the time also offers a series of mini printable books for kids.

This particular book gives young children (officially aged 3-5, but potentially slightly older kids too) an opportunity to write about their feelings.  At only 8 half-pages long, this rhyming book asks kids to write out what makes them happy, sad, scared, mad and glad. In addition, it asks children to record the best feeling they’ve ever had and one additional emotion of their choice.

This resource can be potentially very valuable for younger children experiencing intense emotions.  While it lacks a certain depth, any exercise which helps kids to identify their own emotions can have a healing (and often long-lasting) effect, and we would recommend this resource for younger children.

For a more extensive treatment of emotions and helping kids to recognize and deal with them, as well as a resource for older children, please see the resources we developed titled My Feelings Workbook and Draw Your Emotions.

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In this TED talk from Kelly McGonigal asks whether it is stress itself or how we think about stress that is harmful to our bodies. As you listen to this informative TED talk, think about how you talk about stress with the kids in your life. How they approach the stress in their lives can have a serious impact on how they deal with it.

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

One of the best ways to help kids deal with difficult emotions when they come up is to prepare them for that time by building their emotional intelligence ahead of time. Grimace is an app designed for just that purpose. Grimace is the brain child of Oliver Spindler and Thomas Fadrus who set out to “find a non-verbal representation of emotions that can be integrated into interactive systems.” From a school research project to they developed an app that allows the users to visually see and put a face to various combinations of six basic emotions:

• Joy
• Surprise
• Fear
• Sadness
• Disgust
• Anger

For $0.99, kids (or anyone for that matter) can have endless fun exploring what emotions looks like and at the same time gaining more insight into their own emotions. Find it on the Apple App Store or visit the Grimace Home Page to find out more about the app and the project that led to it.

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