Self talk

An excerpt from ParentingIdeas:

"Self-talk is the foundation strategy to teach kids to shift their thinking about a negative event." A negative event happens such as a child’s sibling won’t share a much-loved toy. The child immediately feels anger. He thinks, “Not again! I hate her! She never shares and it’s not fair.” This thinking feeds his anger, which starts to spiral. In a heartbeat he’s lashed out at his sister for inflicting such an injustice on him. Here’s what happens…… Our thoughts, often reflected through self-talk, change when we experience an emotion. We tend to focus on the event that caused the emotion. Anger shifts our attention outward to the thing, person or event that caused it. Sadness shifts our attention inwards toward the loss. Our emotions change how we see the world. We are usually more optimistic when we are happy and more pessimistic when we’re sad. The key is to change your self-talk. By changing the chatter in your brain from something negative, catastrophic or unhelpful to something more realistic, positive and helpful can help get you through a challenging situation. Positive self-talk examples include: “Stuff happens. I can cope.” “It’s no big deal.” “I’ve put up with worse than this.” “I may want it but I don’t need it.” Help children develop age-appropriate self-talk scripts for a variety of common situations they meet so they can avoid an escalation of their emotions. Then encourage them to change the monkey-brain tape in their heads when they catch themselves saying negative, catastrophic or down-right regretful things.