It’s , and this year’s theme ‘Know Yourself, Grow Yourself’ emphasises the importance of self-awareness and self-discovery in fostering good mental health, says Heather Rutherford.
This week reminds us that we need to keep talking about mental health. NHS England’s latest figures show that one in five children and young people have a probable mental health condition, and many continue to struggle into adulthood. Children’s mental-health charity Place2Be has an important impact, with 40,000 children booking an appointment with one of its professionals last year, and 91 per cent of 11 to 18-year-olds saying their mental health improved after just one session.
Knowing and growing is a wonderful theme to build upon at home, and one that brings us closer together as we help our children explore who they are, how they can recognise and manage their emotions and how to uncover what they need to flourish and thrive.
Here are three evidence-based approaches to start using right away that encourage self-discovery and emotional awareness – and build all-important connection and resilience.
1. Emotion Coaching: helping children understand and manage feelings
Emotional awareness is the foundation for self-regulation, self-esteem and resilience. It’s an important life skill to know how to acknowledge and understand feelings and find healthy coping strategies instead of being overwhelmed. As they develop, children learn this from watching us, but we can also guide and support them by being their Emotion Coach.
Emotion Coaching starts with teaching our children that all emotions are OK. It’s normal to feel joy, frustration, anger, jealousy or delight. It’s what they do with the feelings that sometimes needs guidance, teaching and the benefit of our experience. Our children are just that – children. They don’t have the life experience or the fully developed prefrontal cortex that does the heavy lifting of emotional regulation. They need our support.
Here's an example. Your eight-year-old finds losing tough. We all like to win and, for the most part, we have learnt appropriate ways to manage our disappointment. We know it’s not OK to throw our racquet across the court or the board game across the room and shout insults at the winners. Children need to learn these skills and, perhaps due to their stage of development or their temperament or copying those around them, they need our help.
We can coach them in how to accept and manage the big emotions that arise when they lose by empathising and validating how they might be feeling. We could say: ‘You don’t need to get upset. We all lose sometimes, and you have another match on Saturday. Let’s go!’ How do you think that might make the child feel? Will they see us as on their side, validating their understandable disappointment and empathising, or will they feel our message is that their big feelings were wrong and should be dismissed, and they might even feel a little ashamed?
Instead, we could say, as we pause and stay close: ‘Wow, it sounds like that was tough. It’s hard to lose. I can hear how disappointed and frustrated you are. I get it.’ We’ve normalised their feelings by telling them it’s OK to feel disappointed and maybe even angry. They know they’re not alone while we respectfully and calmly remind them it’s not OK to kick the wall. When they’re calm, we can revisit how they felt about the game, what they think they might work on for next time and come up with a way for them to appropriately let out their understandable emotion. That’s self-awareness and growth.
How to be an Emotion Coach:
- Stop what you’re doing, listen and tune into your child. If they are small, get down on their level. No matter what their age, put down your phone and calmly show with your body language and your tone of voice that you are fully engaged and interested. Try not to interrupt them.
- Get curious and try to imagine what it feels like to be them. Perhaps they don’t have any of their friends in their new class, perhaps their brother finds reading really easy or they just want to keep playing that game (they’re winning and it feels good!). How might that feel?
- Empathise and validate emotions and ‘Name It to Tame It’. Rather than dismissing the feeling or trying to fix things, we want to reflect back to our children how it might feel for them. Dr Dan Siegel coined the phrase ‘Name It to Tame It’ for us to use when emotions run high. When we name the feeling, we tame the emotional overwhelm: – ‘I can see how frustrated you are. I get it. You don’t like it when I tell you it’s time to turn off the iPad.’ – ‘Reading feels hard for you, and it seems unfair that Fred finds it fun and easy. You might even feel a bit jealous.’ – ‘Moving between two homes is tough. I’m wondering if this all feels too hard sometimes.’ We’re sending the message that ALL emotions are acceptable and OK, even if some behaviour needs to be redirected.
- Work on problem-solving. When everyone is calm, which means no one is overwhelmed with emotion and we all have access to our rational thinking brain, we work to come up with solutions and solve problems together.
Emotion Coaching works to improve behaviour and our relationship as children learn that their emotions are normal, they’re not alone in their distress, they are understood by the ones they care about the most and they are safe. It’s a vital tool for us all to use to build emotional awareness, emotional intelligence and help children develop and grow.
Ideas to try:
- Expand your family’s emotional vocabulary. Emotional literacy is an important part of self-awareness, and we can practise using more precise words to talk about and describe feelings. For example, “sad” could mean lonely, disappointed or despairing. “Angry” could be frustrated, infuriated or jealous and “happy” could be content, delirious or relieved. The more granular we get with our emotions, the more self-aware we become.
- Listen more than you talk. This is a hard one for parents, as we are in the business of fixing, sorting, helping and generally moving life along. Rather than validate and empathise with their feelings, which we know is the better path to moving through big emotions, we often and understandably want to jump in and problem-solve or try and take their big feelings away. We can practise being an active listener, letting our children take the lead and repeating back what we’ve heard: ‘So, you got on the bus and all the seats were taken and no one made space for you. It looked like they were pretending they were busy. That would feel so awful!’
2. Curiosity: encouraging self-discovery and growth
Curiosity is a character strength that fosters self-reflection, problem-solving and empathy. Not only does using and modelling curiosity help our children develop a growth mindset, it also helps us support them on their journey of self-discovery.
Curiosity is a parenting superpower. Being curious helps us tune into how each of our children experiences the world. Through our understanding of their unique temperament and character, we can reframe how we see them and be more compassionate and supportive while helping them leverage their strengths and manage the things they find more challenging.
Curiosity helps us:
- Uncover and make the most of our child’s unique temperament. Perhaps you’ve recognised that your child finds adapting to new situations daunting or uncomfortable and is reluctant to try new things. Thinking about their temperament helps us avoid labelling them and then inadvertently looking for behaviours that fit the bill. Rather than thinking they are ‘the shy one’, we can reframe things to focus on the positives. We can look at them now as the one who likes to get the measure of things, who is intuitive, perceptive and very caring and empathetic. Rather than overprotecting or apologising for them, our curiosity helps us to compassionately work to set things up so it’s more likely that they will thrive and make the most of their unique qualities. We might say: ‘I’m excited that you want to try the hockey club. I know you like to get the measure of things and ease in. What do you think we could do to help you get ready?’ Soon they’ll learn to set things up themselves.
- The narrative we have about our children becomes their inner voice. Wouldn’t it be great if that inner voice and the story they tell themselves is a compassionate and positive one? The child who finds it hard to sit still may be harder to manage and, in our exasperation, we might tell them that they are stubborn and difficult. If we get curious and look for the positive, we might reframe their traits as very high energy, persistent and tenacious. We can transform our relationship and work on teaching them strategies that make the most of these wonderful gifts.
- Getting curious about how it FEELS to be them helps us to work with our child, embrace their temperament and problem-solve to come up with strategies to make the most of who they are. The more our children feel we ‘get them’ and the more they work to understand themselves, the better equipped they are to tackle the inevitable challenges that life brings.
- Reframe mistakes as a learning opportunity. A huge part of self-awareness and growth is about learning from mistakes. When we lead the way with curiosity, we’re showing our children that what we believe is important. We might say, ‘I know that’s not the mark you wanted on that test. What do you think might help you improve next time?’ There is no judgement or shame; instead, we’re supporting our children to think through how they can problem-solve, learn and improve – important hallmarks of a growth mindset, which is the belief that abilities and intelligence can be developed through effort, learning and perseverance rather than being fixed traits.
- Encourage self-discovery. Modelling curiosity for our children with open-ended questions and supporting them to try new activities and experiences to discover what they enjoy all build self-awareness. We might say, ‘Tell me why you love football so much?’ or ‘I love that you love drawing, and you come up with incredible ideas.’
Ideas to try:
- Become a pro in asking open-ended questions. Instead of ending up with a yes/no reply, practise getting creative with your questions:– ‘What was one thing you loved about your day and one thing you found hard?’– ‘How does it feel to be back at school after such a long break?’– ‘What is it about fossils that you find so fascinating?’ – ‘Can you think of another way we could solve this problem?’
- Model exploring new things. We may think our kids are not interested in what we’re up to. That may be true as they go through the various egocentric phases of childhood, but we can show them that learning, curiosity and messing up sometimes are lifelong processes.
Our curiosity about who our children are and how they experience the world sends the message that we’re open and interested and gives them the confidence to be themselves.
3. Connection: building strong, supportive relationships
The deep connection we have with our children provides the strong foundation to their journey of self-awareness, development and growth. Their confidence in our reliable presence allows them to believe in themselves and gives them the freedom to explore who they are, how and what they might contribute and build successful healthy relationships.
The tiny interactions we have with our children, whether we’re parenting apart or together, build connection. The relationship expert John Gottman’s concept of the emotional bank account can be helpful in visualising this bond. Our relationship with our children is like a bank into which we make deposits and take withdrawals. When it’s full, our children feel secure, seen and valued and are more inclined to co-operate and communicate. But when it’s in the red, there can be disconnection, uncertainty and perhaps conflict.
We top up the balance with a kind word, special time together and shared family experiences that create a sense of belonging; by showing genuine interest, validating their feelings, making a repair or giving a hug. We make a withdrawal with harsh words, criticism, losing our cool or not meeting their expectations. Parents need to make withdrawals. We have to set limits, we need to say ‘no’, we disappoint our children, but we want to make withdrawals from an account that is continually well topped up or full. We need to keep those small intentional deposits flowing.
Dr Dan Siegel reminds us that the brain grows through healthy relationships. Consistent positive interactions – ie, those deposits – shape the neural pathways that help children regulate emotions and develop self-awareness.
Finally, when our children feel connected and secure, they’re more likely to be open to our influence and our ideas. Some children are more open, share more readily and are happy to get things off their chest. Others are temperamentally more guarded, and with those children we might need to work a little bit harder to help them express their thoughts, feelings and even their hopes and dreams. In our busy lives, we need to be deliberate in slowing down and creating those moments to hear, understand and connect.
Ideas to try:
- Hit the Pause Button. How we respond to our children matters. Try this pause technique when you feel your buttons have been pushed, or in fact in any other moment that you’d prefer a deposit over a withdrawal: pause, breathe and respond. The pause gives you a moment to reconsider your reflective response and tap into your curiosity, the breath soothes your nervous system and helps you stay calm and the connection-focused response models emotional regulation while preserving your relationship.
- 10 minutes of children-focused one-on-one time can make all the difference to your connection. Try your best to consistently carve out child-led special time, as research tells us this is a relational game-changer. Intentionally reconnecting and being available after separations (school, overnights, time with a co-parent, a business trip) is a great way to show our children that our relationship and their feelings matter.
- Make the most of family meals. Research shows that having just one weekly family meal leads to better relationships, improved performance at school, better nutrition and better mental health. Positive family experiences around the table create a sense of belonging that helps build strong self-esteem and emotional awareness.
Being present, listening with compassion and empathy, being curious and interested and focusing on the small consistent deposits in our emotional bank account all help children feel safe, secure and deeply understood and connected. From this foundation, they’re able to explore who they are, try things and fail, think about what makes them tick and know themselves and grow.
For more information, please get in touch with Heather Rutherford at
Resources used for this article:
Mary Sheedy Kurcinka
Raising your Spirited Child
Dan Siegel
The Power of Showing Up