Empowering young minds with emotional resilience for a brighter tomorrow.
Learn more about your child's emotional health.
Tweens may not fully have the words to identify the feelings they are experiencing. Kids often talk or share their emotions through clues, often given through actions/behaviors or physical symptoms.
If you see your tween experiencing an emotion, use the opportunity to help them name and accept their feeling. Be patient and have a feelings card handy to help them pinpoint the emotion. Remember they might be feeling more than one emotion, that’s perfectly normal.
You may be tempted to provide the answer to what they are feeling. Allow the child to help define their own feelings. Your role is to offer suggestions if they get stuck. When a child shares their uninterrupted story of how they feel and why, skills are reinforced for future use.
Validation means acknowledging another person’s experience without judgement. This is important for tweens because they are developing their own ideas and testing social norms about emotional expression. Sending a message that feelings are welcome and important, will encourage deeper conversation. Validating your tween’s experience doesn’t have to mean you agree with their perception; simply being understood can open later doors toward re-framing and re-defining their conclusions.
Some tips and tools to identify, accept, and validate what a child is experiencing include:
Social health is having healthy relationships with friends, family, and the community, and having an interest in or concern for others. Your tween will naturally begin pulling away from family while peers become more important. However, they are still learning how to interact with others and your example, support and encouragement can teach them healthy ways to build relationships. Allow your teen to practice their maturing social skills, then provide gentle encouragement on what went well and how they might improve. Having a good framework of how to have healthy relationships with peers and adults can set them up for lifelong success.
Talk to them about how to interact positively with others to make meaningful connections. Encourage them to talk to someone new, be open, practice listening, and to be themselves. Acknowledge things may be awkward at first but will get better with practice. Middle school is a time to explore and friendships often change. Remind them every kid feels nervous. Establishing clear routines and rituals for various times of day like mornings and after school provides structure.
Learn more about your child's social health.
Making time for family time is key in helping tweens build social health. Family engagement will and should look different for every family. Family time needs to be able to work for your family, but there are things that you can build in.
Set clear boundaries with your tween and follow through with those expectations. While it is never fun to “be the bad guy,” your tween will appreciate it. Involve your tween (when appropriate) in setting family rules and consequences.
Adults can help tweens build relationship skills by role modeling and talking about what a healthy relationship looks like. Healthy relationships take work, but helping a tween learn what makes good relationships is a lifelong lesson.
It is important to remember that while adults have years of experience navigating relationships (platonic or romantic), this is new territory for tweens. Talk about your own relationship experiences & outcomes; share both successes and failures to help your tween appreciate how tricky relationships can be. Ensure that you highlight how you handled when a relationship ends.
Healthy relationships share certain characteristics that teens should be taught to expect, including:
Unhealthy relationships are marked by characteristics such as disrespect and control. It is important for youth to be able to recognize signs of unhealthy relationships before they escalate. Help your tween practice how to have hard conversations by role playing at home.
Think about your own social interactions during a day. It takes a lot of skill to navigate with family, co-workers, and strangers. These skills are often referred to as “social skills”. They are the tools a person needs to be able to communicate, learn, get their needs met in healthy ways, make friends, keep themselves safe, and ultimately develop healthy relationships. Tweens need reminders as they have new life experiences which social skills to use or build upon. Allow failure & coach them on how to resolve issues by focusing on their independent skills. Building these skills will take time and practice; however, you can be a role model and guide for your tween.
Encourage face-to-face communication and contact for your tween. This will help your tween develop skills to “read” people, build confidence in social situations, and help provide connection between peers and others.Some tips for face-to-face communication include:
Skills are commonly built when a tween has opportunities to engage with groups of kids through sports or hobbies they enjoy. Encourage tweens to become involved in arts, music, sports, or other hobbies to practice engaging with other tweens.
One way to blend emotional and social health is to share feelings with others. Try using I statements such as: “I feel __(emotion)__ when you _(_specific action)__ because __(effect)__”.
At times, getting a conversation started with a tween at times can seem impossible. Here are some tips on how to get a conversation started.
If you are struggling to get more than a one-word response from your tween, try some of these questions or any other open-ended question.
It can be frustrating when your tween won’t communicate. Be patient and keep trying. Research shows that even though middle school is a time when tweens begin to pull away, they still want and need your attention and approval. Being open, empathetic, and non-judgmental will most likely lead to a better outcome. Look over this chart and see if changing the way you talk to your tween elicits a different response.
Try saying/doing this:
Avoid saying/doing this:
Parents: put your phones away. Give your children your undivided attention. Establish family rules for phone, social media and internet use for you and your family and keep them. Your example will help set the tone for use in your home. Schedule electronic free time daily for games and reading and connection outside and inside your home.
Many parents have concerns about what their tweens are doing online. The internet is a vast place with a full range of content, everything from the positive and educational to dark and troublesome. Being aware of what your tween is doing online can allow for discussion and skills building.
Remember that not all time online is equal. If your tween is spending most of their online time on things like schoolwork, educational websites, and building healthy social connections, you may not need to be strict on time limits. However, if most of their time is on time-wasters, degrading content, or sites that lead them to feel bad about themselves, consider installing time limits on these types of activities or redirecting to more positive content.
Tweens and teens still need help mastering self-regulation. This can be especially difficult on social media, which is designed to be captivating. Monitor your tweens social media accounts and talk about the interactions that happen. Encourage a balance across all the things they do in a day, including online activities.
For lessons, guides and templates to use to set limits and encourage responsible social media use visit:
Learn more about your child's physical health.
Spiritual health refers to a sense of purpose, connection, and meaning in life that goes beyond material or physical needs. For children, this aspect of wellbeing is crucial as it helps them develop a deeper understanding of themselves, their values, and their place in the world. Spiritual health complements mental wellbeing by offering children a way to cope with stress, anxiety, or difficult emotions.
As a parent, nurturing your child's spiritual health can involve encouraging activities that resonate with their values, fostering open conversations about beliefs and emotions, and providing opportunities for reflection and connection with nature, community, or their own inner thoughts. By supporting their spiritual growth alongside their mental and emotional development, you help them cultivate a well-rounded sense of wellbeing that can positively impact their overall happiness and resilience.
Learn more about your child's anxiety and stress.
As a parent, you hope to always be able to shield your child from the bad that can happen. Unfortunately, bad things can and do happen. We sometimes call those bad or hard things trauma when they overwhelm our ability to manage life effectively afterwards. A trauma is any event that is deeply upsetting, scary, or harmful. Some children will be more impacted by these types of big events than others. After a trauma, the emotional effects can last for a few days or weeks or for a long time. It can be hard to move on because trauma affects a child’s sense of safety, trust and ability to make sense of the world around them.
There may be signs that your child may be struggling, such as: intense fear, unwanted thoughts or images, negative feelings, avoidance of reminders, problems with attention or sleep, easily angered or “on edge”, not doing things they usually like to do.
There are things you can do as a parent to help your child process what has happened and move forward.
Learn how to manage tough situations.
Learn more about external resources to help your child.