Teach kids to calm themselves

I ran across an interesting article on how to teach kids to calm themselves [Teaching Children to Calm Themselves - "When Luke gets angry, he tries to remember to look at his bracelet..."]. Although I work with children like the ones in this article, I generally don't write about child discipline with cases this severe in mind...meaning, my advice is geared more toward the general population of kids with a loving, supportive family, but the behavior indicates that mom and dad can go about things differently to get better results.

But if you think about it, ALL kids can use the techniques in this article. I think that from a very young age, we don't teach our children how to comfort themselves since we do EVERYTHING for them. We don't want to see them hurt, so we intervene in an effort to help. In the process, we rob them of some very important self-soothing lessons.

So if your child's behavior is to the point of angry outbursts that you really don't know how to address, check out this article and do some more research. It takes some training to deal with children who are hurting to the degree stated in this article, but even for the average kiddo, cooling down strategies are always good!