Teddy Bear emotions

I promised you a few posts on emotional intelligence, and want to start off with sharing with you about two games that has helped Sweetpea a great deal in the way of naming emotions.

They are called Bear Pairs and Rainbow Bears, and I bought these as part of my 'kit' when I became a consultant for Play2Learn educational Toys at the beginning of this year. They are made by Smile, so you know it is good quality and well thought through!

Anyway, like I said, they were intended to be part of my 'business' toys and not for my own children to play with. But as I very quickly realised, I simply cannot sell something to a mother if I don't know from personal experience that it is a good product, so I took it out one afternoon to see how Sweetpea would take to them. They have been a hit eversince (and not in the way you'd expect...as you soon will see!)

Bear Pairs is made up of 12 sets of bear shaped cards. We started playing the simplest game first: finding each bear's match! I laid the bears on the carpet and Sweetpea would search for the matches. (Great for visual discrimination AND midline crossing!) The next step is playing that classic memory game where all the bears face downwards and you turn over two at a time, trying to remember where the match is. (The bears are all cut from the same die, so the child can't guess by means of the shape.)

Just a sample of the bears from the Rainbow Bears game

Rainbow Bears is intended as a game for teaching primary and secondary colours. Two of the bears have spinners on their bellies (primary colours and black and white, and secondary colours and black and white), so the children spin and then pick a 'button' in the matching colour to place on the corresponding dots on their bears' bellies. Both sets come with instructions for several variations of these games.

But what has this to do with my two-year old and her emotions? Well, you will notice that the bears from both sets show a beautiful range of facial expressions. When we first started playing with these, we spent a lot of time talking about each bear, its expression, its clothing etc, and made up stories about why they felt like that. The bandaged bear was an instant favourite with Sweetpea, probably because she could relate to having bumps and bruises!

It was shortly after I introduced this game when she one day told me she was feeling sad. I realised that she had never used that word until we first played with the bears, so I picked a few of them with expressions that I thought she could relate to, and kept them next to her bed. Whenever she experienced an intense emotion, I pointed it out to her by showing the corresponding bear and talking about it!

Words are such a powerful tool: imagine feeling something overwhelming - be it joy or anger or sadness or excitement - and not being able to communicate it to the people you share your life with. When we teach our children the appropriate names for their emotions, we empower them. We can then help them to cope with those emotions in a healthy , positive way.

I want to add here that I am also training my children not to 'wallow'. We do not tolerate whining, and try not to indulge dramatics (my daughter is a little prone to exaggerations - she does have half my genes, after all!) If a child bumps a head or stumbles, I try to resist running to their rescue immediately (unless it's justified. However, I am always amazed at how quick they recover when no one makes a tremendous fuss out of every little bump!). Instead, I want to teach them to deal with it, and then get on with life. Joy is encouraged around here, and although feelings of real, legitimate sadness, fear, anger etc, are recognised and allowed, we aim to teach our children to work through negative emotions quickly and efficiently, so that joy and peace can be restored as soon as possible!

If you think your child can benefit from the two games mentioned above , you can order them from me via e-mail.

Triumphs and Tears

I read this passage in a book once and as my children grow, I often remember it in those moments when I realise they've just reached a new milestone...

Watching something you love grow, is both pleasure and pain. Each new phase - crawling, walking, talking - brings shouts of pride, but with each comes the mourning of the phase gone past. Never again the cluck of her chin as she fed on my breast; never again small enough to carry in one arm while I stirred soup or carried turf with the other; never again an infant lying in a muslin-covered basket in the top fields while we worked. The soft down of her scalp, fingers the size of beads, the mysterious whispers before words come: behind the joy in each new talent, I regretted the passing of the last. I had a secret longing to keep her small and precious and a part of me. As miserable as I had been during pregnancy, I now often dreamt that she was back inside my body and that the two of us were floating like that forever, each clinging to the other for soft comfort in some eternal womb.

Time is impatient to take your child from you. So you learn that each moment is precious and that life is an inevitable clock. The pleasure of rearing a child is just a prelude to the pain of letting them go, and I anticipated that with an ache every day of her small life. I thought it would make it easier when she finally reached adulthood. But it didn't.

No matter what wisdom or tricks for happiness you learn, a mother worries every day for the life of her child. A wise one will pretend to let them go to keep them, but it's just a sweet amd sensible lie. Motherhood is a sweet, sweet suffering; a joy today is marked by fear for tomorrow and a craving for yesterday."

From: Recipes for a Happy Marriage - a novel by Kate Kerrigan

Note: This was a beautiful story, but please be advised that this

book contains swear words and an extra-marital affair.

Bittersweet. That is the best way I can describe the incident that occurred in our home tonight. Oh, maybe this might seem so insignificant to you, but this mother's heart was touched. Yes, with both a pang of pain AND a tender joy.

I was catching up on some writing after having put the children to bed, when I heard Sweetpea start to cry in her room. I left it for a moment, hoping she'd go back to sleep, but then I realised that through her sobs she was saying something she has never said before "Mama, scared!"

I opened her bedroom door and had to smile a little: Missy had never been asleep after all, but had quietly been unpacking her entire bookshelf and her tea set and was now standing right in the middle of all this chaos, her chubby cheeks tear-stained and flushed with both exhaustion and emotion. I asked her what the matter was and she said: "Scared, Mama. That one there!" She was pointing to a large, hard-cover collection of Dr. Seuss stories. Of course I immediately realised the reason for this distress: The picture of the green old Grinch. She kept her distance while I packed the book away where she couldn't see it anymore and I remembered how, as I child, I was terrified of touching pages with pictures of frogs on them, as if they could come alive by the mere touch of my hand!

You're a mean one, Mr Grinch!

(Found this picture on the Internet, the actual book that cused the drama is now in her room where she's fast asleep)

I comforted her and tucked her in and laid down beside her in the now darkened room, stroking her hair as I hummed a lullabye. And I thought of how I had tried to delay this day: the day when she would first say that she was afraid of something.

A friend of mine's toddler son went through a phase where he was scared of everything, and I told myself then that he was only scared because they have taught him the word. I figured it's like a tool: I would give my child good tools, positive ones, like words for expressing happiness and joy and excitement. I have done well in that department, and she is just as eloquently able to express her feelings of anger and sadness. But to me, fear was in a league of its own and I was trying my best to keep her innocent of the concept of fear. Yes, I know. Silly mommy.

And yet, now that it has come, I am surprised that I also feel a sense of delight: because my child has learnt something about her own emotions. She has found a way to express a thing inside of her that has caused her distress. She has made a connection between this abstract, unseeable emotion and another abstract, invisible thing: a word. We've read a few books about feelings over the past few months, and I try to remember to help her name her emotions when I recognise them in our daily situations. It really is gratifying to see it bearing fruit now!

I try to keep this blog REAL - sharing with you ideas I use with my own children, showing you what we are up to, and sharing my excitement about products I find educational, fun and inspirational. And since emotions seem to be a recurrent theme in our home at the moment, over the next few posts I will share with you tips and ideas that I am finding helpful as I guide my children on the road to emotional intelligence. I would LOVE to hear your comments and what works for you, so be sure to drop me a line!