5 Coping Strategies for Young Ones to Embrace Their Emotions & Fears
Children experience a huge array of sentiments and feelings, just like adults. To list down a few, they can feel anxious, sad, bored, embarrassed, disappointed, and scared. At the same time, grown-ups also experience emotion with each passing day. As mature people, we are not exactly taught how to cope or deal with fears and emotions. But, according to the current situation, kids need to be taught the necessary skills to manage their feelings. Therefore, it’s imperative to educate children on the basic coping mechanisms to help them face their fears and keep calm and cheery.
The question is, what are the main reasons that cause extreme fears or phobias in children? Without healthy coping mechanism skills, kids will likely act as if they are haunted or possessed by their fears and phobias. Children from an earlier age need to be familiarized with overcoming fears and phobias that restrain them from reaching their full potential and building self-confidence. One of the best children’s books on coping mechanisms and overcoming fear is The Bedtime Guardians by author Dan Morley which encourages children to build self-assurance and be strong enough to handle and let go of fears.
There are some specific fears or phobias in children who always have some starting point – some incident that brought that fear to life. It could be related to any accident connected to a person or something they heard about in a movie, story, or news that made them frightened. For example, many children fear dogs, and that fear projects in their minds because of an actual scary encounter with a dog, a movie, story about a dog attack. These incidents give birth to fears in children’s minds, and parents should take knowledge and work on ways to reduce them.
This blog post presents five ways to help your young ones overcome fear and phobias and help them build self-confidence.
Reading Bedtime Stories That Deals with the Fear
Reading your children’s bedtime stories and explaining how to act out when they encounter a scary situation can help young ones to overcome fears. The tactic is termed healing with books. It’s immensely helpful because children have a unique way of identifying the characters who share the same fears, letting them understand that they are not alone and feel the same way. This way, kids open up and share their worries with you.
Many Bedtime stories books of 2022 have greatly reduced fears and phobias in young children because books provide a fantastic temporary distraction for kids, particularly those who dearly love to escape into stories.
Educate Children on Positive Self-Talk
When children are sad, scared or upset, their self-talk is likely to shift towards the negative side, and they become vulnerable to catching negative vibes. So parents need to teach their kids how to have positive self-talk that’ll help them be more optimistic about their fears and encourage them to use kind words when they think about themselves.
Inspire Kids to Use Mood Booster
Help your kids construct a list of all the exciting things they love to do when they’re content—such as singing, dancing, playing games or telling funny jokes. These are their actual mood boosters. Then, when they feel scared, motivate them to use their mood booster list. Then, even if they don’t feel interested at first, support them in doing some fun activity that can help them feel better.
Provide Them Calming support
Make your child feel safe, and never undercut the power of your words. When your kid opens up and shares their fear and concerns, they feel overjoyed and satisfied when they hear the calming words: “It will be okay,” They will undoubtedly feel more secure. Your supportive words will eventually become a model that your child can use. Our kids tend to copy how we deal with our fears. So set an example for your kids on how to handle their worries calmly and satisfactorily.
Help Them Practice relaxation Tactics.
If the fear and phobias of the dark make your child tense and troublesome, then educating them with relaxation strategies could be a great regain of self-confidence. Help them practice the one tip multiple times until it becomes nearly “automatic.” For example, you could put a reminder picture on the fridge or place it beside your kid’s bed. The trick is how your child uses that coping fear tactic the moment it starts to build in.
