Value ‘Navigator’
A PROTECTIVE BEHAVIOR PROTOCOL
To Help Children Balance Emotional Investments
Supplemental materials to Brainz Article: Helping kids invest their emotional currency published on12.12.2022
In this navigator, we will be providing a framework that allows you to conceptualize your own emotional energy as worth and applicable, intentional, and proactive behaviors to create balance. We will be helping you apply that framework to your support of children in any capacity (home, school, community, therapy, etc).
By consistently helping children invest their emotional currency in these 6 areas, we can protect children from focusing their thoughts, feelings and behaviors that lower their value and deplete their emotional accounts.
For strategic plans that are uniquely tailored to your community specific risks, resources, and needs please get in touch with us at contact@mindtheclass.org and we will partner with you to architect a protective environment with proven protective behavior solutions.
Here are some ways to apply each of the 6 protective factors for emotional investing with children.
1. INTEREST
Things of high interest produce a lot of value, think of this as “behavior goes where reinforcement flows”.. Therefore if we shape prosocial interests in children, they will learn to engage in those activities more, think more positively about those activities, and feel better when engaging in those activities. In youth communities, one way that we may increase interest is by adding more youth-directed activities through surveys. Try some of these applications.
Validate any inequities that may restrict access due to resources, geography, culture, economic or political barriers. Explore outliers and focus on the pathways not the barriers outside the child or adult’s control.
Encourage children to define ‘interesting activities’ and what it feels like to be interested in something. Reflect on memories of activities that were interesting and explore the 5 principles of control that we define as: process, effort, mindset, attitude and intention behind those activities. Allow children to notice how interest develops based on exploration and learn how motivation is a secondary experience that follows engagement.
Teach youth how to experience greater interest in things by practicing mindfulness and encouraging a conscious focus on our control rather than external influences.
Provide opportunities to explore a variety of activities and notice what factors contribute to continued interest and which contribute to losing interest. Allow children to notice that interests are something that develop and change.
Discuss how influences have led them to explore or avoid different activities and allow children to discover a desire to shape their influences rather than be shaped by their influences.
2. TIME
How we spend our time is extremely valuable as we cannot change the amount of time we have. Children are taught a view of time through a certain lens, either as something they control or something that has control of them. One way that we may increase time value is by providing psychoeducation on mindfulness based activities that reduce time spent on less valuable thoughts and feelings. Try some of these applications.
Want more? Read Cassie Mogilner, Happier Hour
Teach children to observe how they are spending their time, how to avoid unwanted distractions, and explore and reflect on joyful activities (including thoughts and feelings).
Teach children to schedule their time purposefully so they can feel a greater sense of control over fulfilling experiences.
Frontload discussions prior to activities, events, or tasks and facilitate a discussion to proactively plan for how they will purposefully spend their time.
Reflect with children on time-sinks and allow children to discover ways to readjust their efforts more purposefully.
Practice observing how much energy is placed on negative feelings and thoughts and explore ways to fill the gap between how the child feels and thinks and how they want to feel and think.
3. COHESION
A feeling of solidarity with others who share a common interest to do good creates social capital and has significant health benefits both psychologically and physically. One way that we may increase cohesion is through family linkage groups that connect local families with a supportive family group network. Try some of these applications.
Want more? Read David Hamilton, Phd, The Contagious Power of Thinking
Validate inequities in your community where social capital is limited and focus forward on the pathways within your control not the barriers. Explore ways to increase social cohesion even with a limited group.
Reflect on your community and notice groups that promote pro-health behaviors like movement, sleep, access to green spaces and nutrition and who help each other, such as with carpooling and sharing information. Explore ways to connect with those groups or remain connected.
Practice noticing those who are doing-good around them and allow children to discover ways to engage with those people more often.
Practice noticing how it feels to be excluded, left out, or rejected and discuss ways to become involved with those doing-good. Practice noticing when others are excluded, left out, or rejected and model empathy and allow children to discover ways of including others while balancing their own needs for safety and inclusion.
Observe risks in standing up for something that might lead to a lack of cohesion and discuss when it might be important and valuable to do so.
4. MEANINGFUL IMPACT
When our efforts result in a meaningful impact on others or the world around us, we feel a greater sense of meaning in life (MiL) which is proven to buffer stress, improve coping and increase healthy behaviors. One way that we may increase meaningful impact is through community partnerships for social improvement projects that connect to learning objectives. Try some of these applications.
Want more? Read Dan and Chip Heath, The Power of Moments
Reflect on good deeds and how it makes them feel. Share the scientific benefits. Explore which values helped make the decision to do good. Recall other memories when those good values were used.
Consider a daily intention that reflects your most important values and discuss ways to practice that intention.
Practice noticing the intention, process, effort, mindset and attitude are the 5 things in our control that have an impact on our emotions and therefore how we invest our emotions. Allow children to discover that feelings around goals or outcomes are temporary whereas the feelings around how we approach those goals are more valuable and stick around longer.
Engage in community projects where children can observe an immediate impact of their positive actions.
Read impactful stories and notice what helped others persevere to make an impact and find meaning among hardship. Allow children to notice connections to their own experiences and future aspirations.
5. RELATIONSHIPS
At the root of a healthy relationship is psychological safety including belonging, connection, reliability, protection, equity and calm. Strong relationships are pivotal to a secure sense of self, a grounding reality and coping with life’s hardships. One way that we may increase meaningful impact is through mentorship groups that include prohealth and prosocial activities. Try some of these applications.
Want more? Read: Matthew Leiberman, Social
Reflect on meaningful relationships and what you value about the other person. Allow children to discover people’s character as most important.
Discuss their character strengths and share your own. Reflect on which character strengths the child feels are most valuable to others.
Notice the unique differences in how people like to be treated and differences in people’s individual needs. Explore ways to use our positive character to provide psychological safety to each relationship uniquely to strengthen it.
Reflect on shortcomings. It can help to start with someone they admire. Normalize shortcomings and strengths and model self-acceptance. Allow children to find ways to accept themselves for both their shortcomings and strengths.
Differentiate between shortcomings and lesser used strengths and reflect on memories of previous capacity and current capacity in areas where the child has put in effort to improve. Model experimentation language to include curiosity, hope and opportunity.
6. FEEDBACK
Personality and culture are intertwined with linguistics and how we communicate. Our emotional interpretation of a situation is based on feedback from people and the environment and is known as a primary cognitive appraisal (secondary appraisal is related to decision making). Basically the way we give feedback and the way we interpret feedback is important to how we value ourselves (self-appraisal). One way that we may increase valuable feedback is through the use of 360 communication plans that may include co-developing rubrics, planning and reflection tools. Try some of these applications.
Want more? Read Ross Greene, Raising Human Beings
Before providing feedback, ensure that both you and the child are calm. Coping with big emotions first allows us to be able to give feedback and children to be able to receive feedback. Sometimes calming is enough for a child to be independently self-reflective and self-correct.
Practice providing self-compassion when children have a positive intention and negative outcomes, or unintended consequences. This also can be enough to allow the child to have self-determination toward progress and improvement.
Explore the differences between feedback and judgment. Judgment, when communicated, reflects our feelings on a situation and is not helpful to feedback. Judgment is helpful as an internal process for decision making. Feedback on the other hand is conscious guidance intended to help someone else improve and allows the child to process with another perspective.
Teach the child 360 feedback in which each person shares feedback with each other on a situation with the intention of improving future scenarios. Feedback should be Future focused (avoid rehashing or debating the past) and E.P.I.C 1. Empathetic (considerate of the other’s feelings) 2. Private (avoiding shame or embarrassment) 3. Immediate (recency helps us recall better) 4. Collaborative (both people involved share their perspective and consider their role and suggest ways to improve)
The Adult Role
Adults should take the role of a facilitator, mediator, and reinforcer in the child’s experimental process. Exposure to new ways of thinking create neuroplasticity that can help you make lifestyle changes to support yourself and children. Notice when you're giving your value away and how children might be learning from that model. Likewise, observe how your fears may be holding you back from sharing your value with others. To further solidify these new ways of thinking, try to put your emotional energy (thoughts, feelings and behaviors) into practice right away. Start small and build.
Facilitator
Recency and frequency of exposure increase the value. Exposing children often to environments that can provide the condition that can help them experience greater interest, purposeful use of time, cohesion, meaningful impact, better relationships and healthy feedback.
Communicate that this is a dynamic process which is exploratory and creating emotional balance requires consistent reflection and adjustments. Communicate an experimental world view. Learning this adaptability, flexibility and open-mindedness early in life can help them tremendously as they are exposed to more complex, complicated or abstract experiences to naturally seek emotional balance.
Share developmentally appropriate personal memories with children as stories. Stories are easy to recall and children can more easily connect meaning to stories than to instructions.
Mediator
Adults can protect children from unsafe situations, including emotionally unsafe situations by stepping in when children are being threatened, harmed or at risk. Provide older children with options for safe self-protection as appropriate to avoid harm.
Provide children with explicit information about unsafe and unhealthy behaviors. Use clear and consistent language. Use the 3:1 exposure rule (Expose children 3 times as often to healthy experiences and information for every time 1 time they are exposed in an unhealthy manner).
Allow children to take safe risks and make safe mistakes. Adults can explore with children, provide opportunities, information, experience and guidance but allow them to experiment and make their own decisions, even if you predict that they may not be completely successful. No effort is a complete failure nor a complete success but learning is a process that includes self-efficacy, requiring children to make their own choice so that they can take responsibility for their actions. If the adults are directing, the child has no responsibility in the outcome and therefore is unable to make the adjustments for improvement without the adult, creating dependency and helplessness. Conversely, they gain autonomy, self-determination and learn to value their ability to experiment in emotionally safe environments.
Reinforcer
Encourage self-reflection first. Avoid expressing how you feel or think about the child’s actions before they have a chance to self-reflect. Children learn to value themselves by what others think when we are quick to praise or correct. Children can learn to make value-based decisions based on how they feel and avoid trying to please adults or evaluate themselves based on what others think and feel given that not all value-based emotional efforts will lead to others praise or happiness.
Share your pride with children through attention and praise for value-based emotional investments. Intermittent praise (not every time) is the most effective. Provide specific praise on their effort, process, mindset or attitude (not on the outcome but on what they had control over that led to the outcome). This allows children to feel more in control and equipped to navigate future challenges and increases autonomy through positive self-appraisal (positive view of themselves).
Show interest in their interests. Engage with children in their experiences and they become more valuable having the attention of an adult they value.
Notice and communicate the value of positive character strengths that contributed to value-based emotional investments. Recognizing success by focusing on character, intention, and motivation for progress.
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