Posts Tagged ‘children’

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As a parent, you may not realize that your child possesses many of the answers to life’s challenges—right in her own imagination. Through learning and practicing visualization, kids can develop emotional self-care skills to help themselves with a variety of everyday, practical concerns.

These imagination tools can help your child:

• Love, accept, and appreciate himself.
• Reduce pain and heal other physical ailments.
• Overcome fears, such as fear of the unknown, abandonment, doctors, disasters, and dying.
• Deal with bedtime issues such as insomnia and bedwetting.
• Cope with death, divorce, and other losses.
• Handle anger, hurt, and frustration.
• Achieve success at school and in sports.
• Live peacefully with siblings and parents.

Here are nine imagination tools you can teach a child to help her deal with stressful times
and navigate the challenges of growing up.

TOOL #1: Use the Balloon Breath.

With her hands around her navel, have her breathe slowly and deeply into her lower belly so it presses into her hands like an inflating balloon. The balloon breath has calming effects and facilitates a waking state of focused concentration and receptivity to positive suggestions. Kids can use it to calm down before musical performances, soothe anger or hurt feelings, or wind down at night, for example.

Tool # 2: Discover A Special Place.

This is a safe, special place within your child’s inner world where he can relax, regroup, or take mini-vacations from the stresses of life. It’s a place to pose endless questions about life issues, and create numerous positive, possible solutions. Your child might visit his special place to find courage before taking a difficult test at school, or to get away from a bully’s harsh words.

Tool # 3: Consult an Animal Guide.

This is an imaginary guide—a kind, loving, and protective creature—that helps children tap into their wisdom. It’s often safer and easier for animal friends to offer solutions to problems in creative ways, than expecting logic and linear thinking to do the work. Your child’s animal guide can help her fall asleep, or practice patience at school in long, boring classes, or be brave before a trip to the doctor.

Tool # 4: Conjure up a Personal Wizard.

Wizards come into play when animal friends “just won’t do.” His Personal Wizard is a mentor and magical teacher in human form who brings a different level of wisdom: human but extraordinary. A wizard can give advice, conjure up special powers such as math answers, and even cure troubling feelings like jealousy, anger, and grief.

Tool # 5: Receive Gifts.

Gifts from imaginary helpers can be thoughts, objects, or ideas that symbolically provide children with exactly what she needs in the moment to help her. Gifts can be obvious or require further explanation by the animal friend or wizard. Sometimes gifts are hidden and need to be unwrapped or dug up. When a child goes to her special place and asks a wizard or animal friend for a gift containing the solution to her problem, she often finds the answer.

Tool # 6: Check in with Heart and Belly.

This tool is comparable to suggestions of “listen to your heart” and “pay attention to your gut feelings.” Children are encouraged to take a few minutes to “check in” with their heart and their belly, and to notice what messages are there for them. The heart and belly often have two different, but equally important, messages to relate.

Tool # 7: Talking to Toes and Other Body Parts.

The body is a repository for lots of hidden information. With this tool, children discover where and how they stash different feelings in their body. Kids then find they can have a dialogue between emotions and/or symptoms to find answers to their concerns. For example, your child might discover that his stomach knows exactly why it hurts every day 30 minutes before school starts—it doesn’t want Mom to leave, and it’s afraid she won’t come back.

Tool # 8: Use Color for Healing.

Color is especially helpful in healing pain. Feelings and symptoms often have different colors associated with them. They can be unique to each individual and change over time. You can teach children how to imagine a color, such as ice blue or deep forest green, cooling down his hot fever. When a child imagines color inside or surrounding her body, it can be a remarkable tool for transforming pain, shifting emotions, and accessing healing energy.

TOOL #9: Tap into Energy.

When words are insufficient, a loving touch from a parent can do wonders to restore calm and well-being. For example, you can help a child “pull the pain” out of his head by holding your hand about three inches from his forehead to give him a direction in which to send his pain—out and away.

You’re now armed with nine simple, efficient, and totally free options to mix and match—depending on the situation and your child’s favorite. When we teach our kids effective imagery techniques to solve their own problems, it can transform their world.

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More about Charlotte Reznick…

Charlotte Reznick, Ph.D is a child educational psychologist, an associate clinical professor of psychology at UCLA, and author of a new book, The Power of Your Child’s Imagination: How to Transform Stress and Anxiety into Joy and Success (Perigee, 2009, $14.95). More information at: www.ImageryForKids.com

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Since the first cave paintings, we humans have found creative ways to express ourselves with art. We naturally draw, paint, and doodle to capture thoughts and feelings. Art has also been used throughout history for healing. Studies show that it creates brain wave patterns that enhance the autonomic nervous system, hormonal balance, and brain neurotransmitters. While doing artistic expressive art, the body’s physiology shifts from stressed to serene.

It’s often easier for a child to talk about pictures than about himself or his feelings (grief, anger, shame, etc.). Drawing will allow your child to express difficult feelings or to disclose what he might not share verbally. Your child’s artistic expression will give you a clearer sense of his inner struggle, an insight that will help you guide him.

Drawing also increases your child’s awareness of his inner world and creates a window onto that landscape. In addition, a child’s artwork can be a launching point for conversations that reveal her thinking about the world around her.

You don’t have to be a trained therapist to use some art therapeutic techniques with your child. Just stock up on a variety of supplies—giant rolls of paper, colored paper, crayons, and a variety of markers, including scented, metallic, fat, thin, even markers that change color as they write over another color. Then try the following art exercises to explore new ways to communicate with your child.

Draw a self-portrait. On a large sheet of paper, trace your young child’s body. Have her fill it in. Older children can design and complete their own. Drawing increases your child’s awareness of her inner world, and it’s easier to talk about a drawing than to express troubling feelings.

Picture the future. Artwork is also an effective starting point when you’re working with clear end-goals, like getting a good night’s sleep or reducing a fear. Have your child draw two drawings—how things are now and how he’d like them to be. Kids often hang these pictures in their bedrooms to remind them of their desired direction.

Show and tell. After an imaginary journey, such as a walk through a special place she imagines with her eyes shut and tells you about, have your child draw her experience. The picture gives you both something to look at and discuss. If the drawing illustrates a problem—say, a dangerous goblin or a fire at home—ask her what might solve the situation. She can even draw the solution right onto her picture.

Accept every drawing. Some kids have a tough time committing their mental pictures to paper; they fear they won’t measure up. Reassure your child that anything he creates is fine. Sometimes all that comes are strokes of bold color evolving out of a wonderful or terrible feeling that is finally set free on paper. Praise each one. They are the artifacts of your child’s inner world.

Talk to the image. Once your child has spilled his feelings on paper, he can converse with them. He might use his picture of Fear to ask what it needs to calm down, or to tell it to leave. It’s much easier to speak to feelings when they’re outside than when they’re gnawing away at his tummy.

Take artistic action. It’s a great release when a child can draw her angry, hurt, or upset feelings, but pictures don’t have to be static. She can erase part of it, or draw over it in “healing” colors with a changeable marker—an immediate transformation that feels magical. She can even rip up or throw away the paper. These actions can offer a hurting child a sense of control and satisfaction.

Capture the memory. The special places your child visits on her imaginary journeys are personal healing sanctuaries. Hanging pictures of them somewhere private but visible will remind her that she can return whenever the need arises. Drawings of trusted animal friends and wizards can help her remember support is always near.

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More about Charlotte Reznick…

Charlotte Reznick is a child educational psychologist, an associate clinical professor of psychology at UCLA, and author of a new book, The Power of Your Child’s Imagination: How to Transform Stress and Anxiety into Joy and Success (Perigee, 2009, $14.95). More information at: www.ImageryForKids.com

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Do you have a highly intuitive child? Read the following 10 traits and check those that apply to your child.

£    My child has a way of finishing my sentences and reading my thoughts.
£    She has an ability to “see” things before they happen and is surprised that other people respond to her predictions with amazement.
£    My child frequently translates the needs of younger siblings and pets for me and is surprisingly perceptive.
£    Noisy, crowded events agitate him and it takes him a long time to bounce back after such disruptions.
£    My child “catches” others’ emotions or upset moods almost like a cold.
£    He is prone to headaches and stomachaches related to other people’s stress.
£    My child feels tension during traumatic world events, maybe even drawing pictures of them or spontaneously talking about them with no knowledge of the events.
£    It is hard to keep a secret or surprise from her–she routinely guesses her birthday presents, for example.
£    My child has a tendency to have insights about other people and the world that outpace developmental norms.
£    She reports feeling different from her peers.

If most of these qualities ring true for your child, your child may be an intuitive empath, or a highly intuitive child. We are all intuitive and capable of empathy, but intuitive empaths possess these abilities more than most people. Intuition involves the ability to pick up on subtle information that is not perceived directly through any of the five senses, but rather is detected through an invisible sixth sense. Empathy is the ability to tune in to how another person is feeling by registering those feelings through the body. Intuitive empaths experience these ways of perceiving the world through an extra-magnified lens.

Gifts and Challenges
Intuition and empathy are incredibly useful abilities in life. Intuition is a source of inner guidance, creativity, imagination, personal direction and meaning, a decision-making tool, and even a personal security system. Empathy helps us step into someone else’s shoes and deeply feel what the other person is feeling. This capability gives rise to qualities such as kindness, compassion, and understanding, all of which can be immensely helpful in creating and sustaining successful relationships.

On the other hand, as the parent of an intuitive empath you may be running up against some unusual parenting challenges that are not readily discussed in most parenting books. For instance, what do you do when your child can tell you’re having a conflict with your spouse, even when you and your spouse have been tight-lipped? What do you tell your child when he has intuitions of danger that turn out to be accurate? How can you help an intuitive child when he feels a friend’s pain so deeply he can’t shake it off, absorb so much of a classroom’s stress during the day that he has trouble falling asleep at night, gets confused by conflicts and thinks that another person’s feelings are actually his own, and even feels the pain of the world? While intuitive children certainly are not rare, they are not the majority either. Most classrooms and school activities do not lend much importance to intuition, and this can leave the intuitive child feeling different or even needing to suppress his or her insights about life.

How to Support an Highly Intuitive Child
As parents and adults involved in nurturing intuitive kids, we can make a big difference in supporting children’s intuition and empathy by not only giving positive feedback for these abilities, but also by helping kids learn how to deal with the stressors that can emerge from living with heightened intuitive abilities and teaching them real life skills designed with their abilities in mind.

Here are ways you can help and support an intuitive child:

•    Stay open to her perceptions without judgment.
•    Try not to inflate or deflate her intuitive experience when you respond to it.
•    Realize that she may need your help in learning how to manage the stressors associated with this trait.
•    Help her see that her way of feeling and seeing life is an important part of who she is–just like any other gift or talent.
•    Remember that these abilities are fundamental to your child’s natural intelligence.
•    Let your child know he is never alone and that you’re available to help him problem solve his intuitive and empathic stressors.
•    If he has empathically “taken on” someone else’s mood, aches, pains, or worries, help him to practice asking “Is this feeling mine?”–and remind him that he’s not responsible for someone else’s feelings.
•    If your child is stuck in a pattern of being very in-tune to others or to the pain of the world, then help your child switch to being on the “self channel.” You can do this with exercise, by encouraging him to express his feelings in art, or even by taking a couple of slow deep breaths with you.

Intuitive children’s messages for us can be simple and direct. Often, they simply require a quick recognition and action, as in the case of Deanna. One day my client Amy was driving her daughter, Deanna, to a toddler play group for the first time. As they drove down the long, winding driveway, Deanna exclaimed, “Watch out for the chickens!” Looking around the clear driveway, Amy asked, “What chickens, Deanna? There aren’t any chickens, honey.” Deanna continued to insist on chickens. While Amy enjoyed her two-year-old’s wonderful imagination, around the next blind curve she was shocked to find not one but four chickens pecking around on their neighbor’s driveway.

You can help keep your child’s intuition alive and help ensure it as a life long gift, instead of a burden. Intuitive empathy is not really a choice in a child. It is an innate lens through which the child perceives life–and it deserves respect and support.

More about Catherine Crawford…
Catherine Crawford, LMFT, ATR, is a licensed marriage and family therapist and registered art therapist specializing in the needs of intuitive empath children and adults. Her new book is The Highly Intuitive Child: A Guide to Understanding and Parenting Unusually Sensitive and Empathic Children (Hunter House, 2009). Her website is www.lifepassage.com

Listen to Kala speak with Catherine Crawford about Intuitive Children in her upcoming interivew on The Explore Your Spirit with Kala Show!  Interview coming soon!

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