The benefits of helping someone else.
Many children identify being helpful as one of their most loved and best qualities. They believe they are their best selves when they are helping their friends, teachers and families. Many of them have beautiful memories and stories attached to this quality, it makes them feel so good about themselves. They also love the positive feedback they tend to get when they are helpful.
Children (and many of us adults) struggle with handling our strong emotions. Regardless of whether the emotions are positive or negative, we tend to be impulsive, erratic and not our true selves in response to them. One of the most commonly despised emotions is anxiety. Children identify anxiety as a horrible emotion which they do not like feeling in their bodies. Some describe wanting to run and hide when they feel it and others describe it as wanting to yell, scream and cry it away. But these are not helpful or resourceful responses to anxiety.
There are many strategies that can be implemented to try and assist with the calming of this emotion, which includes deep breathing, grounding and other self-care techniques. We want to highlight one which tends to fly under the radar but one we believe has an all-round positive impact. This is about connecting the child with one of their most loved qualities about themselves and behaving through it; that is, being helpful.
Apart from helping us manage our anxiety, getting lost in a moment by being helpful to someone else also:
floods our system with positive feelings,
gets us focused on a task which we don’t have to lead ourselves,
helps us to come into the present moment instead of the ‘worry’ of anxiety, and
allows us to connect with someone we love and trust.
Let’s not forget the most important point -**** It helps someone else!****
We don’t have to wait to feel bad to kick start being helpful, we can make it a daily focus which will help keep us connected to our best selves and also to those around us. It might even help us to reduce the severity of our emotions too.
So, guide your child to look around them and notice who they could help, especially when they are flooded with strong emotions like anxiety, frustration or even a lot of excitement! We all tend to get carried away when we are emotional! Simple things like putting the dishes away, helping the teacher clean up before recess or helping a sibling with their homework, all counts.
Parents, you can make this tool even more accessible by implementing it into your own lives. Next time you catch yourself feeling emotional,
name your emotion, and
jump into helping your child with whatever they are doing.
Being an example of the process you want your children to implement, is the best way to teach them.
