Five Steps to Building Your Kids' Emotional Health

Children may be small, but they experience big emotions. Your challenge as a parent isn’t to keep your kids from feeling afraid, frustrated, or overwhelmed. It’s to teach them how to handle those feelings when they come.

The good news is that regulating emotions is a skill your children can and should learn, and you can teach them. Helping children manage their emotions isn’t about stopping their feelings. It’s about giving them lifelong habits, biblical truth, and practical tools to find peace in the middle of them.

There’s no one-size-fits-all formula for raising emotionally healthy kids, but you can consistently point your children toward peace by practicing calming habits and anchoring them in the unchanging love of God.

How?

Eliza Huie is joining me on Focus on the Family with Jim Daly to equip you with the tools you need to help your children manage their emotions and keep their focus on God.

Eliza is the director of counseling at McLean Bible Church located in the Washington D.C. metro area. She shares her “five to one” model of thinking that helps children self-regulate their emotions:

· Five things God made that bring you joy.

· Four gifts from God that make you feel peaceful.

· Three people in your life that God uses to encourage you.

· Two promises of God that give you hope.

· One word that describes God and calms you down.

When children experience something scary, sad, or frustrating, the resulting emotions can be overwhelming because they don’t know how to process them in a healthy manner. While this is normal, they need your help to process and move through their emotions. We’ll show you how.

Hear my full conversation with Eliza on your local radio station, online, on Apple Podcasts, or on our free phone app.

While you’re online, try our free parenting assessment. It will quickly give you an overview of how your family is doing in several key areas and offers suggestions for improving the relationships in your home.

Eliza Huie’s book is Count Yourself Calm: Taking BIG Feelings to a BIG God (targeting children ages 4-7). It gives parents a simple, practical way to help their kids move from overwhelm to peace through connection, empathy, and healthy emotional regulation and is available for a gift of any amount. For more information, click here or call 1-800-A-FAMILY (232-6459).