Hi, the topic we're going to be discussing today is mental health and wellness in early childhood. I put mental health and wellness as the topic title because I think sometimes mental health has a negative connotation if that is what we label. This topic, when we talk about mental health, a lot of people are concerned about mental illness and they assume that might be what we're focusing on and talking about. And we're really not, we're talking about, wellness, we're talking about how your mental capacity and your mental help can affect your day to day life and what you can do to help with that. So we want to be thinking about the wellness of our daily lives. So if children feel safe, they can take risks, ask questions, make mistakes, learn to trust and share their feelings and grow. And we want children to feel safe in our care, we want them to feel safe in their environment and we do that by assisting them in their daily wellness. So, what is mental health and wellness? So one aspect is a child reaching their developmental and emotional milestones, learning healthy social skills. And that is something that we should be discussing, teaching, modeling, talking about all the time. Learning how to cope when problems arise. And we can help children with that by giving them different strategies to use when they are in a difficult situation or in a conflict. And mental health and wellness is an overall important part of your health. And if you do not have that wellness or that positive mental health, it can affect other parts of your life and your day. It includes emotional, psychological and a person's social well being and in those that affects how people think, feel and act. So your wellness determines how you can handle stress, how you relate to others and if you are making healthy choices. So one part of mental health and wellness that is really important is emotional intelligence. A person really needs to have some kind of emotional intelligence to be able to successfully be a part of a classroom community or overall society. So it's a type of intelligence that involves the ability to process emotional information and use it in reasoning and other cognitive activities. And that's from the American psychological association, that definition. And there are four abilities that we attribute to emotional intelligence. So it's a person's ability to perceive and appraise emotions accurately. We need to understand what our emotions are and what our feelings are and where they come from and how we can handle them. And how we can best appropriately show them. And we also need to understand another person's emotions and how we can assist other people. So another ability is to access and evoke emotions when they facilitate cognition. So we need to be, when we are learning, when we are in a social situation, when we are with other people and we're working in a group. We need to be able to cooperate, we need to be able to collaborate and work with other people in a positive manner. And another ability is to comprehend emotional language. It is important for us as teachers of young children and caregivers of young children to talk about those expressive feeling words. And I'm talking about words like angry, sad, happy, excited, frustrated. Any of those words are really important for children to understand. And unless that we give them those words and show and explain what they are and they feel them. Then they're not going to understand what they are. So labeling our emotions and helping children to label their own emotions, is a really important part of emotional intelligence. And the other one is to regulate our emotions and to understand what is appropriate to do in certain situations. And how we can best show our feelings inappropriate manner. So, why is emotional intelligence important? Well, it's important for self awareness. So self awareness, we need to be able to be aware of what our own feelings are and identify them in an appropriate way. Self regulation, the ability to control those strong feelings and strong emotions and show them in appropriate positive ways. It's important for motivation if we do not understand our feelings and how we feel about things and where they're coming from. Motivation might not be part of our daily, sorry, my brain just went dry. So, empathy, we really need to teach children that their actions might affect other people. We need to teach them that other people might feel differently in certain situations than we do and that's okay. So showing that other people have emotions and feelings that might not be the same as ours is an important teaching moment with young children. Social skills, working together, being able to enter a group, being able to form friendships, being able to share materials or share friends I guess is a good one too. We need to be talking about that daily with children and modeling all of these different ideas. Relationships, we as adults need to form relationships with all of the children in our classroom. Some children we will be drawn to easily. Some might take a little bit more work, but it's important to show all of the children in your classroom that you care. And that you want the best for them and that you will be available to them if they need anything and that you are just there. All the time. Emotional intelligence is important in conflict situations. If we cannot control our emotions, if we do not understand our emotions, then we are not going to be able to positively resolve conflicts in our daily lives. And we need to recognize how our emotions can affect others also. How can we teach emotional intelligence to young children? We need to help them be aware of their emotions. So if a child is upset, if a child is crying, if a child is happy, if a child is excited, let's label that, I see that you are crying, are you sad right now? And if they say yes, then ask why? Why are you sad right now? What is making you feel this way? So that they understand what the emotion is, how it is labeled and maybe the cause of it. Also, especially with angry emotions, you can feel that in your body. And sometimes if you make children aware of what their body feels like when they're angry or they're excited even that helps them to understand it and label it too. So if you're angry, your body tenses up and you might just be all a ball of tension, if you're excited, you're just can't stop moving and you're just a ball of energy. So helping them to understand what their body is feeling is also important. Encouraging children to talk about the feelings that come with challenges and challenges are so important for young children. Failure is not bad, failure is just a way to learn. So talking about especially frustration is a really good one with challenges. So a child is trying to build a block tower and it keeps falling over. You can help them label that feeling and help them get through it with success. And by success, I mean not giving up. That it's okay to feel frustrated, it's okay but it's how we handle it, that is what we need to be aware of. Being frustrated a way to handle that is not throwing the blocks because we're having trouble with them. It is to keep trying and when they succeed then celebrate that. Practice reading emotions in others and that's really important for empathy, to understand what other people are feeling. So if you see a child that is upset or crying or happy or whatever the emotion is, draw that attention to another child, especially if the other child caused that emotion. So if one child took a toy away from the other and the one child is crying then we can talk about how that child feels. So you took that toy away from Sally and she's crying. How do you think she's feeling right now? Is a good way to draw that to them. Then you can bring it back to them and reflect if that has happened to them before. And if you know it has, you can say, do you remember the other day when Joey took the toy away from you and how it made you feel? Well that's how Sally feels right now. Was that a good feeling? And you can talk about that and if you bring it back to the child, they're more easily or easily able to understand. Teach a variety of strategies for regulation and there are so many and you're going to find that different ones work for different children. So you have to keep supplying these strategies until you find the one that fits that child. The same with when we're talking about guidance and discipline, you have to figure out what each child needs in order to help them succeed. So different strategies that you can use are taking deep breaths and that can be done in a sitting position, in a standing position and it can be done where you're lifting your arms over your head to really feel those breaths. And so it's in your nose and out your mouth. It can be done laying on the floor, which is a great way for children to to see the physical part of their body. They can see their chest rising. If you put maybe a small stuffed animal on their chest and they're taking a deep breath, they can see their chest rise and fall and see that animal rise and fall. So they understand that. Some other strategies are counting, counting to ten and then thinking about what's going on. Maybe a kind of fidget toy, whether it's like a squeeze ball or a motion thing with the liquid in it that you pour up and down and you watch the liquid so there are different kind of fidget ideas that you can use. Some other strategies are a child being able to go find a space where they can be alone until that they feel like they have control of themselves. And you might hear that called like a cozy corner or a calm down corner. That should be in your room, you should have that space for children who need it. And in that space you would include some soft pillows, maybe some books and in those books with pictures of facial expressions to show emotion. You might want facial expression cards in there, you might want some of those fidget toys, you might want some soft stuffed animals, maybe some puppets, something. And you're going to have to figure out again what works for each child and what you want to include there. But many times if you make that available to children and if a child can't calm down and you suggest that they go over there, they're going to do that eventually by themselves because they're going to know it helps them. So great idea to have something like that available for the children that you care for. Find ways to help others, so if another child is having some difficulty maybe offering to help, not just doing it, but offering to help to see if they want some help. And that gives you great self-confidence and self-esteem as a child to help someone else with something. And practicing empathy, thinking about how other people are feeling and reacting to different situations is an important skill that some adults do not do well. So teaching that to children now helps them as they move forward. So some specific strategies that you can use for children in your care. Having group games and simple games, where there are simple rules, where they have to take turns, where they have to wait. They have to understand that. Everyone is not going to necessarily win, you want to be careful with winning and losing, but if you want to say you were the first one done and then keep playing with the other children until everyone has completed the game, that might be a good idea. Fantasy or role-playing and that can be in your dramatic play area, a great place to have fantasy and role-playing. Let the children really express themselves in there and don't try to control and guide them a lot, let them figure it out themselves. A lot of the interest areas in your classroom, including the blocks, really give children great social skills because they might have to work together, they might have to figure out conflicts, they might have to ask if they can join to play. All different social skills that are really important that you're going to see in a lot of the interest areas, especially if you guide the children at first and help them with those words. Sensory play is wonderful for calming down, when you have rice or water in your sensory table, it is a great calming activity for many Children. Creative play, again, let the children do what they want, don't take charge of their play. Books and stories are really important for teaching social skills, emotional intelligence, and empathy because you can talk about the characters in the books, you can ask the children, how do you think this character is feeling by their facial expression? How do you think they're feeling by how their reaction was? How do you think that they are feeling because of what happened? And then you can relate it to the children. Have you ever felt that way? Has this ever happened to you? And if you related to them then they really can understand, but make sure that you're including that in your stories and books, you're not just reading the story, but you're involving the children and helping them to understand the feelings and emotions of characters in books. I'm starting the day with a morning meeting or check in different ways that you can do that. I have seen in classrooms where children come into the classroom and they have their name and they can put it under what emotion they feel at the moment. And there might be a happy face, a sad face, an angry face an excited face, and they can put it under there and throughout the day if their feelings change, they can go change where their name is. So, it's a great way for them to understand that their feelings might change throughout the day. Talking about in the morning, having a morning song of how do you feel today? Maybe asking, what you did this morning and how that made you feel. But having a morning check-in to show children that you want to know, and you're interested in how they are feeling. Puppets are a great way to teach many things, but great way to teach social skills is you can use these puppets as play actors, act out different situations in front of the children and then talk about them and how it made the children feel and how they think the puppets feel. And you can even really include situations that might have happened in your classroom and just adjust them a little, do not include any children's names or anything like that. But to help children kind of see from a third-party position, like what it looks like. So, puppets are a great teaching strategy and all classrooms and all people working with young children should have puppets as part of their curriculum. Think out loud, so, this is kind of like a modeling skill that we can use with children, and then eventually they might do it themselves. But to think out loud and label how you're feeling if you are upset about something because something is happening, it's okay to say how I'm really upset that this happened. And if we're saying that as adults, children understand that it's okay to have all of these feelings. It's okay to feel angry. It's okay to feel upset. It is how we handle it that we have to be careful with. Again, the cozy area, and you can actually look online and see examples of different cozy areas that are available. They have items that you can buy if you have some extra money, a health and safety grants or something. Maybe they have little cubes that are really nice that make it kind of private for children to go in there and self-regulate. Offering a positive, welcoming, and supporting environment definitely helps with a child's wellness. We need to make sure that they feel welcome that they know we're glad to see them every day and we will help them in anything that they need. And modeling like I said, we need to model the behavior that we want the children to be showing. Okay, so, children's wellness can be affected by many things. One of the popular and now is the popular but this is something that is discussed often. I just went to a New York State AEYC Conference and there were quite a few trainings that actually were specifically about the ACEs, the adverse childhood experiences. So, it's something that we should be aware of and if we're aware of it then we can help support children. So, ACEs are potentially traumatic events that occur in childhood and in this childhood we're including 0 to 17 years. And this is the list of the current questionnaire, the events that are included in there. So physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, physical neglect, emotional neglect, mental illness, divorce, substance abuse, violence against your mother, mental illness, or having a relative who has been sent to jail or prison. So what this is, is there's a questionnaire that children might take, and it says, have you ever experienced any kind of physical abuse? And there's a yes or no, no specifics or anything. All of these are, have you experienced this? Yes or no, and when a child is done, you add up their score. So we, as early childhood professionals probably are not going to be giving these two children, it could be their pediatrician, it could be a psychologist, or a therapist working with the child. But adding up these scores can help determine children with higher A scores may have negative effects as they move forward and they can be physical and they can be mental and they can be social. So adverse childhood experiences Some of the traumatic events can be considered toxic stress which is a prolonged activation or occurrence of one of those experiences. So if physical abuse is happening often and is happening for a longer period of time that can cause toxic stress for a child which has negative effects on many parts of their development. ACEs can have a lasting effect on a person's health, on their behaviors and on their life potential. So if you have a high ACE score then these three things can have a negative outcome. I'm saying can, I'm not saying will, okay? So possible effects of childhood trauma can be lower brain development or delayed brain development, lower or delayed cognition poor physical health, not understanding emotions, having negative relationships and negative mental health. So I said these ACEs can affect a person's outcomes, and I'm saying can because not every child or person with high ACE score might have negative outcomes in those areas and part of that is attributed to a person's resilience. So resilience according to the American Psychological Association is the process and outcome of successfully adapting to difficult or challenging life experiences. Especially, through mental emotional and behavioral flexibility and adjustment to internal and external demands. So resilience is how well that we handle difficult situations and what we do in those situations to get through them. Hopefully, in a positive way. And the factors that might contribute to a person's resilience are the way that they view and engage in the world and that can be part of their temperament that can be a person's upbringing, and it could be their support system. The ability and quality of social resources. So that could include a few things that could include their immediate support system, friends, family, teachers, church members, community, peers. Do you have people that you can turn to for help and that are going to support you? But it also could include resources in the community. Do you have access to those resources? Do you know where to turn and where to go if you need that help and coping strategies? We can teach coping strategies to children along with the self-regulation strategies, that's part of a coping strategy. Risk factors for resilience really it's the circumstances and what is happening in the community that may increase the likelihood of adverse outcomes. So risk factors could include no social support system, not knowing where to turn for help and could include poverty. It could include not learning any coping strategies. So those are all risk factors for resilience and if you have a lot of those, you're probably not more likely to have a positive outcome in challenging situations or in trauma situations. But there's something called protective factors, and they are things that really help you through that, and they reduce the negative impact and those are the opposite of the risk factors. They are having, that social network, having teachers, family members, peers, whatever it is that will support you, and that will tell you that you're important and show you that you're important that they care. And being able to access any of the resources in your community definitely make for a more positive outcome. And if you have the temperament of looking on the bright side and always thinking positive that might help and be a protective factor and if you have those coping strategies, that's really important. So this is from healthy kids dot org and I just really liked this. Thinking about wellness and that it affects your whole being wellness does. So thinking about wellness and this is sort of like nutrition too, but It's a bunch of things all rolled into one, I guess. So the 5-10 rule, if we can teach us to Children, teach us to families. It's really easy to remember having five or more fruits and vegetables each day, two hours, a lot or less of recreational screen time. one hour or more of physical activity, zero. Sugary drinks and drinking more water. 5210 is the numbers for healthy lifestyle and mental health and wellness and my end quote every day in 100 small ways our Children ask, Do you see me, do you hear me? Do I matter? Their behavior often reflects our responses. It's a really important vote, and it gives you a lot to think about. All right, thank you.
