How To Make 5 Cheap Family Emotional Well-Being Activities
How To Make 5 Cheap Family Emotional Well-Being Activities
How we feel as a mum often has a direct impact on our family. If we’re happy and playful then our kids usually are, if we’re calm then our kids are often calm. But life isn’t all happiness and laughter. Sometimes we will feel sad, angry or unmotivated.
So yeah, you’ve guessed it, if you feel down in the dumps or angry then that’s probably going to affect your kids. This isn’t a bad thing, it’s about being realistic not to make you question your mothering. It’s perfectly normal for us to experience a spectrum of different emotions.
Life’s hard for us all at times but some of us may be feeling anxious, depressed or having a high pain day, all of which may leave you feeling snappy or despondent. Trying to make yourself happy isn’t realistic so allow yourself to feel this way. It’s okay not to be okay, the key is knowing how to respond to these feelings.
As you can’t change any of this you need to communicate with your children and other family members how you’re feeling, and they need to do the same thing! It’s hard to communicate our feelings whether we’re 8 or 80 but the younger we are the harder it is for us to even understand what we’re feeling.
Have you experienced having no idea why you suddenly feel super grumpy. Think about how this must feel for young children who struggle to even name their feelings. This is one of those times when you have to take action with your family for it to benefit you completely.
This blog has 5 emotional well being activities that can be made cheaply. These activities are things that I’ve used in schools when teaching 4-7 year olds and children with special educational needs or disabilities (SEND). Or we’ve used it as a family to improve our communication skills.
These 5 emotional well-being activities are for you to try with your family:
Mindfulness Moments - Take 5 for some deep breathing, relaxing music etc.
Coping Cards- Use colours or numbers to rate a problem and match to a coping skill.
Calm Down Kit - A way to manage emotions, build self esteem and keep calm.
Feelings Jar - A way to understand and cope with the world of mixed emotions.
Feelings Tracker - A colour coded system to see if there are any patterns to how you’re feeling.
I’ve chosen these 5 activities for a small budget and explained how to use them with children and if necessary how to adapt them for teens and adults, so you can use them as a family. You can add these to a routine easily by using my well-being planner. Download this for free by signing up to my Strong Mum’s mailing list.
Five Emotional Well-being Activities
1. Mindfulness Moments
There are many ways to practice mindfulness during the day for all family members. Many of us struggle to stay calm when our children misbehave or are being so loud you can’t think. We easily lose our cool and can then make a bad call and overreact with punishment that could dismiss a child’s feelings.
These simple activities can help you regulate your child’s behaviour. However, self regulation is usually developed in childhood, when we learn to control impulses and develop a toolkit to reflect our feelings. Learn these exercises for mindfulness with your child so the whole family can grow.
What You Need:
A quiet space
5 minutes
Timer
An outside space such as a garden, park or quiet street
Colouring pens
Colouring book (see below)
Deep Breathing - Sit comfortably and put your hands on your tummy. Take a deep breath in and blow up your tummy like a balloon. Then let all the air out. Repeat - breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth. Breathe in again but hold your breath with a big tummy. Count to 2 then breathe out. Repeat or use as a warm up.
Get Active - Go outside and run in a big circle for 1 minute (use a timer or stopwatch), kids need to stay where they can hear your instructions. Stop and reach to the sky on tiptoes. Then do 10 star jumps. Stop and curl up in a ball. Do 5-10 hops per leg. Stop and stretch wide like a starfish. Repeat with similar actions, using the stop and start pattern.
Body Scan - lie down comfortably with eyes closed and imagine the sun is warming you up all over. Focus that warmth on your feet. Imagine golden sunshine moving slowly up to your knees, warming your legs, hips and up through your torso. Move it slowly down each arm, pausing to let tension go.
Scavenger Hunt - Go out into the garden or down the street and give your children a few things to find. If you only have 5 minutes then give them something you know they’ll find. In autumn it could be leaves, cookers etc. Or choose things they see or touch, rather than collect, e.g. a red door or a tree.
Laughing Yoga - (it’s fun not woo-woo) Sit comfortably and take 3 deep breaths in through your nose, flaring your nostrils. Then breathe out of a wide open mouth. Laugh as though you’re different animals e.g. squeeze your cheeks and nose to laugh like a hyena or scrunch your face to do a lion's roar.
Have a colouring book and sit with your child and colour whilst listening to calming instrumental music. Setting a timer can help you stay present. You could keep a sketchbook and draw lines, shapes etc. Check out these colouring books for children and adults.
The Mindfulness Colouring Book : Anti-stress Art Therapy for Busy People
Children's Coloring Book - Confident You and Fantasy Drawings : Boost Self-Esteem and Creativity
You can do all of these activities with your child or as a family. You can lengthen the time you spend doing these with older children or challenge yourself by adding more ambitious exercises or adding the body stretches in yoga. Expand your knowledge of breathing exercises and body scans by reading this meditation blog.
2. Coping Cards
Learning coping skills is a big task and varies widely as what works for someone will be different to someone else or even changed depending on the day. As children grow they’ll change and adults can probably skip some steps. Before creating your coping cards you’ll need to work with your child to see how they respond.
What You Need:
Pen
Paper
Paint tester cards
Postcard sized card or blank flashcards
Coping Skills For Kids checklist - Download this one for free here
Firstly, set up a system using colours or numbers to rate each emotion. Paint tester cards are a great way to label, as you can show the steps towards the strongest emotion. If you don’t have these, you can create your own colour chart.
With young children use one feeling per card and label 1-5 (5 being strongest). Older children and teens can add more feelings, using similar words as shown. Discuss how to order them to show how they escalate. Adults can add these to a journal.
Start with five or six widely recognised feelings. With young children I’d use angry, happy, sad, excited, calm and scared. Positive feelings will help to show opposite emotions as what they’d want to feel after calming down. Ask your child what makes them feel this way. Choose a colour for each feeling.
Once you’ve explored these feelings you can create the Coping Cards. Using categories on the downloaded checklist (linked above) to guide you, discuss what helps your child when they’re feeling sad, angry etc. Teenagers can use the checklist to do this themselves.
Help your child create a set of coping cards by matching a coping skill to each feeling. Children respond well to visual prompts, especially when they’re not coping, so take a photo or draw the activity they’ve chosen for each feeling.
Get a postcard or A5 sized card and fill out the top sections as shown,
Fill in the blanks with your child so they get another chance to talk about it. If your child is young you can use feeling emojis so they don’t need to read.
Add the image of the coping skill underneath.
If you can, laminate or cover with clear film so they last longer.
Repeat this for each coping card then punch a hole in the corner before connecting the cards with a split ring or treasury tag.
You’ll need to make everything easily accessible, such as props or toys to support your child’s plan, Teens and adults coping plans could be kept as a phone note, voice memo or in a journal, such as the one I’m creating for well-being. You can sign up to my Strong Mum’s Mailing List to be the first to know when this will be available.
3. Calm Down Kit
Once we’ve learnt to understand our different feelings we need to build up effective strategies for when strong emotions overwhelm us. By creating a calm down kit with emotional well-being activities, we can access our support system in challenging moments. Anyone can allow emotions to take over so these kits are for all ages.
A calm down kit will look different for everyone but it will work best for kids when it’s personalised to their interests. The kits can be adapted as children grow and their interests change. They can be set up for specific emotions too, for example someone struggling with anxiety. Click here to read my anxiety coping strategies blog.
What You Need:
A box, bag or backpack for organisation
The coping cards you made
Any toys or items you’ve chosen for the coping cards
Items from the suggested list below
Feelings books as suggested below
An inviting, accessible area at home, read this article for great ideas
Other items appropriate for your child or yourself as shown below.
Top tip: get 2 to avoid any upsets.
Yoga Poses Cards - Each card is beautifully illustrated and gives you detailed instructions.
Stuffed Toy like this Fabelab Buddy Fox A perfect gift for a little one to make a friend for life. The corn fibre filling is a well-rounded natural option for easier washing and means it keeps its sturdy shape no matter how much its cuddled and played with.
Breathing Exercises as in Step 1
Calming music or Audiobook such as this Hygge Meets Mindfulness: A Book Bundle The 30 Day Mindfulness Challenge. Thirty days to greater happiness, greater peace, self-awareness, gratitude, and to the real you.
Bubble Wrap
Fidget toys like those in this Magnificent Magnets Science Kit - Learn about the magic of magnets in this magnificently awesome science kit.
Essential Oils like this Women's Balance Aromatherapy Duo - Includes 1 Remedies to Roll Women’s Balance,1 Aromatherapy Blend Women’s Balance
Puzzle books like this Kids' Book of Dot to Dot
Sensory Toys - For instructions on how to make these last, read my messy play ideas blog here.
Add feelings books to your collection for exploring emotions when your child is calm.
Children
Teens
Understanding Myself : A Kid's Guide to Intense Emotions and Strong Feelings By Mary Lamia - For 12-17 years. Chock-full of cool psychology and info on emotions, real-life stories from kids, interesting facts, and feeling quizzes.
Don't Let Your Emotions Run Your Life for Teens By Sheri Van Dijk - For 12-17 years Don't Let Your Emotions Run Your Life for Teens is a workbook that can help. In this book, you'll find new ways of managing your feelings so that you'll be ready to handle anything life sends your way.
These kits are a positive way to deal with behaviour from stressful situations. This helps us teach children to self regulate and develop their self awareness so they can pause between a feeling and reaction. This article explains the psychology and importance of self regulation.
4. Feelings Jar
After learning to self-regulate our emotions we discover the world of mixed emotions. We often experience so many emotions, it can be hard to break down everything we’re feeling. Learning how to respond to this is more complex. The Feelings Jar is an effective way to help kids who struggle to self regulate.
When we were dealing with the huge changes my brain condition brought, we all experienced strong, mixed emotions. As parents in this state of mind, it was hard to make the right judgement call to help our boys self regulate. We were honest about our negative thoughts and used a window to represent the illness.
We screamed and shouted to release our feelings of being embarrassed, angry, scared etc. Once we’d done that, we opened the window to let the feelings go. We celebrated small wins with a positivity jar to remind us there were good feelings too. This wouldn’t work for everyone so I want to share the Feelings Jar idea with you.
What You Need:
2 clean jam jars
A Sharpie pen
Labels
Craft Pom Poms
Draw equal lines of measurement up the side of each jar. Label each line with numbers 1-5. Use labels or coloured lids to show clearly which jar is positive and which is negative.
Using your emotions colour system from the coping cards activity, sort the Pom Poms by colour to match both positive and negative emotions.
Ask your child to choose one colour e.g. red for angry and fill the jar with Pom Poms up to the level (1-5) they’re feeling angry. Talk about what is making them feel like this as they fill the jar.
If the Pom Poms go over the level you’d expect, talk to them about how that emotion grew bigger than it needed to be. Repeat with positive feelings.
Then go back to the negative emotions jar. Ask your child whether they can take any Pom Poms out now they’ve focused on the positives. You can encourage them by making a game of throwing or “exploding” the pom poms.
As our boys grew older we still prioritised time to talk about how they were feeling each day. This could be at a mealtime or after school. We started monthly family meetings to talk about the big picture. Doing this showed the boys how to handle big emotions and mixed feelings. These activities show your child their feelings are valid.
5. Feelings Tracker
A feelings tracker is a colour coded system to look for patterns in how you’re feeling. This is quite a common bullet journal activity and there are apps available to do this too. This is one of the emotional well-being activities you can use with children after they’ve learnt to recognise different emotions.
Our emotions change depending on situations, our personality and temperament. Recording our feelings helps us identify behavioral patterns and give us insight into the way we think. To get accuracy you need to take time to reflect at the best time of day for you. Be specific about what, when and where you were.
What You Need:
Coloured Pens
Paper, worksheet or bullet journal
Stickers (optional)
After deciding on how to record you’ll need to choose the colours which represent your emotions or what you decided in the Coping Cards section.
Add a labelled colour code for easy reference.
Each day record the date and time of your entry
Colour the section of your image or grid with the colour to show how you feel.
Add information about why you or your child felt like this.
Make notes of what you were doing so you can compare habits
Detail how the situation was dealt with so you can make comparisons.
Regularly check your data to look for patterns about what makes you or your child happy, sad, anxious or excited.
Our habits could be adding to our feelings by helping us or hurting us. Tracking this can help us find what we need to change and know the support we need to do that. Another benefit of this is that you are being present and mindful whilst making these entries. We have the power to change and choose how we respond.
How To Make 5 Cheap Family Emotional Well-Being Activities
It’s perfectly normal for us to experience a spectrum of different emotions and due to the stress modern living puts on our brains, we are likely to experience anxiety or worry at some time. Many research projects have shown mindfulness is great at reducing this as these activities are based on being present and self aware.
It is hard for us to communicate our feelings at any age and our personality and experiences affect how well we understand what we’re feeling. These emotional well-being activities help us to understand basic and mixed emotions so we can regulate our responses.
Understanding how the positives can outweigh the negatives we feel, can calm the part of our brain that reacts with strong emotions. Our brains are wired to focus on negatives, which is why we’re more likely to worry or feel stressed. But we can rewire the brain by sending regular positive messages.
One of the most helpful things we can do as a parent is understanding how emotions influence our child’s behaviour. Exploring patterns in their emotions helps us make better judgements about the reactions we have, understanding helps us stay calm during challenging moments and empathise with how our child responds to stress.
The aim of these emotional well-being activities is to filter the negative feelings so we can be calmer. This helps regulate the information that goes to the part of the brain that helps us make good, sensible choices. By teaching and modelling self regulation you and your child will be able to temper your reactions to emotional situations.
Stay safe,
Laura 💜
P.S. I can help you to work on the areas that you need to develop or help your child learn. My free well-being planner is perfect for this with a guide to help you work out what to prioritise.. Sign up to my Strong Mum’s mailing list for access to this free download here.
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