Grounding and Supporting Emotions with the Breath

Description

Grounding meditations become useful as our modern world sees more children becoming impacted by anxiety. With anxiety on the rise, we need to find ways to support our children in learning how to ground,  self-regulate, and self-soothe. Anxiety is a normal part of childhood development and most often occurs in times of change or uncertainty. However, when your child’s anxiety impacts their day to day activities causing unhappiness, there are things you can do to help support them through this time.

Anxiety can present differently in each child but common signs of anxiety may include:

• avoidance behaviours
• physical symptoms such as a tummy ache or headache
• difficulty sleeping or waking in the night with nightmares
• excessive worry
• needing constant reassurance and support
• perfectionism
• inability to regulate emotions

Supporting your child with anxiety may include:

• acknowledgment of how your child is feeling. Let them know you have heard what they are saying and how they are feeling
• gentle encouragement to overcome their fears/feelings
• standing back until your child actually reports feeling anxious rather than trying to “fix” the situation before it has become a problem
• praising and positively supporting your child when they have done something that made them anxious
• not labeling them as anxious

Helping your child manage their anxiety is a positive strategy you can teach them. Often your child may experience anxiety when they are not with you, they may be at school for example. If they have some strategies that are easy for them to do, they will become much better at managing their anxiety and self-regulating their emotions.

Here is a grounding meditation to support them with this. Grounding and supporting emotions with the breath takes the child into the present moment in a safe and easy manner and is suitable for primary school children aged 7-12 yrs with full sight or vision impaired children.  With the backing music from the amazing Christopher Lloyd Clarke.

Have a browse through our shop for more meditations for your primary-aged children.

Enjoy!