A good way to understand and absorb the learning is to think about the activities for yourself, then think about the activities for your child or children. Modern life is very stressful with lots of worries and stresses and we have seen an increase in our access to social media and information overload of the world around us. The past couple of years have been very uncertain and we have all been through a lot of difficult times including the pandemic, costs of living rises, and worries around the world. There has been an increase in mental health issues and anxiety and some children are experiencing difficulties in school life after missing learning and social opportunities. This is just a general overview, there might be other reasons you feel you need to learn more about our fight, flight, freeze response and the busy mind… and although you are probably doing this course to help your child, you may need a little bit of time to think about yourself as well. If you help yourself, you will be in a much better headspace to then support your child.
As we move through this course I will say ‘child’, but I am aware that you may have more than one child you wish to help through this learning to better support their health and wellbeing. I have added some reflective thinking points as well, some may be useful to you, some less so, we are all different and we will have our own likes and dislikes and ways of thinking so just take what you can from this information and see it as the foundation of your learning and understanding.
So the first stage is to read the information and think about yourself and your own fight, flight, freeze response and busy mind. Then re-read and observe your child and think about what might be going on in their mind and how this shows through behaviour.
How you can support your child with this information is all dependent on their capacity, some children are non-verbal or may struggle with a parent teaching them something new. So, you may either be learning to:
- Observe and understand your child and think about how you can adapt your support, such as modeling a strategy.
- Support them through the activities with less discussion and do the strategies together.
- Discuss or do the activity sheets with them and help them to be independent when doing the strategies or learning.
All the content within this course, the wording, information, activities, strategies and techniques have been done with lots of young people before creating this course and they should be easy to do. If your child does struggle then use the information you have and have a look at how you could adapt the information or strategy to make it more doable for your child. The main thing to take away from the course is to get breathing right when doing the techniques and also to breathe more calmly during the day.
As you navigate this learning think of it as ‘informing’ you, then ‘implement’ into your life. Try all of the techniques and activities and work out which ones you like and will carry on using and which ones your child likes and will carry on using and have these as the strategies you can fit into your routine.
