Blogs
Helping Children Through Big Changes
A new school, a new house, a new baby, a goodbye. Change asks children to give up something familiar before they can see what replaces it, and the gap between the two is where most of the difficulty lives.
Why Every Feeling Deserves To Be Heard
It is tempting to sort feelings into good ones and bad ones. Children learn that sorting very quickly, and once they have learned it, half of what they feel goes into hiding.
When Words Are Hard To Find
Some children go quiet exactly when they most need to be heard. It is not stubbornness. Speaking about a feeling asks a child to do several difficult things at once: notice it, name it, judge whether it is safe to say, and then say it out loud to someone who is watching.
Finding Hope In Difficult Moments
Hope is the tenth Feeling Face, and it is the one children reach for last. It does not arrive to cancel out sadness or fear. It sits beside them, quietly insisting that this moment is not the whole story.
Creating Safe Emotional Conversations
Children rarely open up on request. They open up when the moment feels safe: when nobody is rushing them, when the answer will not be corrected, and when the adult beside them seems ready to listen rather than to fix.
Helping Children Name Their Feelings
A child may be laughing one moment and suddenly become quiet, frustrated, or tearful the next. When an adult asks, "What's wrong?" the answer is often, "I don't know." That response does not always mean the child is refusing to communicate. Many children genuinely do not yet have the words to explain what is happening inside them.
