This past Friday we kicked off our Winter/Spring season in Trinity by announcing our rebrand to “Trinity Dad’s Coffee” (hence the domain change).

Our goal is to make Trinity Dads Coffee a permanent fixture at Trinity School!

Most of the details were in the email that I sent out, so I won’t repeat them in this blog.

Discussion Questions

• What does it mean to build a vocabulary to identify, understand, and respond to emotions in oneself and other in a healthy way?
• How do we give our children perspective with emotions:
  • “Learning that a one in life is losing my car keys and a ten is losing a family member.” 
• How do we cultivate empathy: The Ability to understand and share the feelings of another?
• How do we build resourcefulness: The ability to take the emotion to something constructive?

Discussion Notes

Emotional Scaling:

Helping our children understand emotions as a scale that actually corresponds to the situation is one of the greatest gifts we can give our children.

1. We are able to help them recognize their emotion when it’s occurring so its not stuffed down and comes out sideways. (see our post on the first step of Non Violent Communication Here)
2. We are able to help the put the right vocabulary on the emotion (see emotion wheel below.)
3. We are able to help them understand how severe the situation is and map whether they are emotionally responding at an appropriate level (“My son is screaming like a someone cut his finger off. (level 10), but what really happened is my daughter took his toy” (level 2))
4. We can also help them understand that they can have big feelings and also have control (“I’m feeling angry at level 7 intensity, but I have level 10 emotional control”)

We talked about how humans have “Neural Wifi” and that we tend to emotionally respond to whatever the emotional temperature in the room is. We need to be able to set the temperature in the room by being able to get the facts of the situation, understand how they are feeling, set it at the right scale, and help by “co-regulating” with our children.

Sometimes we need to regulate ourselves in order to help our children 🙂

Action to Try – Following Week

Journal or try a few moments where you can:

1. Help yourself, your spouse, or your children delineate what the appropriate level of feeling should be for a moment when the opportunity arises.
2. Show your family the emotion wheel to talk about different words for emotions so they have the appropriate vocabulary.
3. Order this calm down corner poster set from amazon and post it in your house!