With the rising popularity of parenting styles such as conscious parenting, gentle parenting, peaceful parenting. Helping children express how they feel has become a hot topic in the parenting space. Parents are taking more steps to understand their child’s emotions by asking them how they feel but they might not get the response they want and their child instead responds with “I don’t know” or worse, they become angered or shut down by your question.
I know from my experience of working closely with parents that they have the best intentions when asking their child to express how they feel, yet what do you do when children can’t express how they feel?
I myself have two daughters who are ages nine and seven at the time of writing this and my youngest often replies with “I’m not sure” when I ask her how she feels.
When children can’t express their feelings you have to get creative.
One of my go to exercises is from the book “trauma proofing your kids” by Dr Peter Levine and Maggie Kline and this is the Gingerbread person exercise – drawing a sensation body map.
Drawing a sensation body map - the gingerbread person
All your child needs is a piece of paper and a number of different colours. You ask your child to draw the outline of a ginger bread person (as shown below) for really small kids you can help them draw this.
With the colours they want to draw a colour coding column down the side labelling what the colours represent. For example:
Blue = sad
Red = angry
Black = numb
Yellow = excited and energetic
Pink = love
Green = calm
Next you want to ask your child to fill-in the gingerbread person using the colours to locate any sensations and emotions he is feeling in the moment and make sure to encourage the expression of both comfortable and uncomfortable feelings.
This gingerbread man activity is a good exercise for children to draw and colour how they feel without having to talk about their feelings.
Adaptation
For children who are very young, shy or learning-delayed the sensation body map can be modified. To keep it simple have your child choose only two colours. One colour for comfortable feelings and one for uncomfortable feelings and the outline of the gingerbread person can be drawn by the parent.
It is important not to interpret your child’s gingerbread person or to make your child feel bad for what they may draw and colour. This exercise can also be repeated. When I first introduced this exercise to my daughters they did one every day and each time they drew something different yet it gave me a great insight into what they were feeling and experiencing.
Like this exercise? Then please share this article with friends and family and let them know about the gingerbread person body sensation map!
If you want to learn more about Maggie Kline and her work as a child therapist, school psychologist and somatic experiencing faculty member you can watch this youtube video of her walking you through this activity below:
