Mental Health & Wellbeing
Mindful Champs
Mental Health and Emotional Well-Being
Kiddycare has recently teamed up with mindfulness company, Mindful Champs, to help support our children to enhance their mental health and emotional well-being.
When it comes to happiness and success in life, EQ matters just as much as IQ. Children need to experience feeling emotions so they can practice tolerating them as well as develop self-control and emotional intelligence around them.
Emotional self-regulation, a key component of emotional intelligence, is the ability to manage one’s experience and expression of emotions. Learning this skill of managing one’s emotions is foundational for a child’s mental health, building their self-awareness, creating stronger relationships, succeeding at school, and achieving their career and personal goals throughout their lives.
With the right tools and practice, children can improve their capacity to emotionally regulate themselves. However, while the world has been focused on academic achievement in childhood, emotional self-regulation has been largely ignored. Children are educated in so many subjects areas, from sounding out words to brushing their teeth, yet we fail to equip them with an emotional education that can dramatically improve the quality of their lives – but not at Kiddycare.
Just like counting in Maths or reading in English, we understand the importance for children to develop the ability to emotionally regulate themselves, communicate, recognise, and express their feelings in a healthy way, as this is a skill that must be taught – it doesn’t necessarily materialise as we age.
Mindful activities we offer:
- Daily journalling – This encourages children to self-reflect, build self-awareness as well as to communicate, recognise, and express their feelings in a healthy way.
- Daily affirmations – Affirmations are helpful, motivational statements that help children to build a positive self-image, boost self-esteem and interrupt negative thinking patterns. We use them to positively kick start the day, when challenging situations arise or whenever we like!
- Character Development – We use the Mindful Champs character development cards to get children thinking and talking about the kind of person they want to be. Confidence, determination, resilience, and honesty are some examples of traits that can sustain children at home, at school, and in the big world out there.
We have made a great start with our mental health movement in our settings and are continuously working with Mindful Champs to keep this up!
