The onset of a new school year can trigger many different emotions: worry, anger, sadness, excitement. Children will need time, space, guidance and support to recognize, identify and manage their feelings. Back-to-school nerves are common. Nervousness comes with new opportunities and new adventures. If children are feeling nervous it is likely because they are facing new and unpredictable challenges.

Identify and label feelings

Help your child recognize, identify and label feelings. No matter how your child feels, it is healthy to put those feelings into words. It is easier for children to talk about their feelings if they know how they feel and why.

Listen to what your child has to say and help them name the feelings before trying to tame those feelings: “I feel nervous about starting school next week.” If your child doesn’t know why they feel a certain way, you can talk with them about it: “I feel upset, but I don’t know why.”

Validate feelings

Acknowledge your child’s feelings as genuine and real. Rather than avoiding or running away from big emotions, sit with them together. When they know that they have been heard, your child may then find comfort as they are not alone with their uncomfortable feelings.

Reassure your child that you are trying to understand their feelings and will help them get back to a calm state. “I understand that you are worried because you don’t know what might happen on the first day of school. That is okay. We can find ways to feel better about going back to school.”

Keep it positive

As your children are preparing for the first day of school, keep the process as positive as possible. Encourage your child to think positively about school. When your child is feeling nervous or upset, it is normal for them to have unhelpful thoughts: “I don’t want to go back to school! I can’t go because it is too scary!”

Help your child notice and identify unhelpful thoughts. Thoughts are like traffic lights: Red thoughts are unhelpful and make us feel stressed and worried. Red thoughts stop us from moving forward and doing what we want or need to do. Green thoughts are helpful and can make us feel brave and confident. Green thoughts keep us moving forward to achieve new skills and goals. Play the traffic light game to change red thoughts into green thoughts.

For example, the following statement recognizes the scary thought, but adding the second, “green sentence, helps to move things forward: “I am scared about going to school. But I can take it one step at a time to help me feel better.”

Explain to your children that we can practice taking charge of our own thoughts by playing the traffic light game. Give examples of thought statements and practice identifying red thoughts and changing them into green thoughts. For example, “I’m not getting any better at this!” can be changed to “I will get better at this if I give it another try.”

Mindfulness, breathing and muscle relaxation

Although we all feel nervous sometimes, we can find clever ways to keep a calm state of mind and body. Practicing mindfulness, breathing and relaxation strategies will result in familiarity and mastery. When faced with big emotions, children can then access their new skills to help them return to a calm state.

Mindfulness

Mindfulness helps us to stay in the present moment rather than worrying about what might happen next. Grounding is a way to focus on the here and now by observing things in our environment while using our five senses. Ask your child to turn on their spidey-senses just like spiderman uses his sense of sight, smell, hearing and touch to keep tabs on the world around him. Ask your child to notice five things they see around them, four things they can touch, three things they can hear, two things they can smell, and one thing they can taste.

Deep breathing strategies

Slow, deep breathing can help us relax and manage the anxiety caused by stressful events. With deep breathing, we can calm our bodies and clear our minds to help us prepare for the task ahead:

  • Imagine breathing in deeply to smell a flower and breathe out to blow out candles on a birthday cake.
  • Imagine a batch of cookies coming out of the oven. As you breathe in, smell those yummy cookies! But they’re hot, so blow on them to cool them down.
  • Imagine a calm colour as you breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth.

Muscle relaxation

When feeling worried, our bodies may respond with tense muscles. With practice, children can learn the difference between stressed and relaxed muscles. At the first sign of muscle tension and worried feelings, your child can then work towards relaxation.

Play relaxation games such as:

  • Robot and Ragdoll Body: After holding their body tight like a robot, have your child shake out their body like a flopsy ragdoll.
  • Rocks and Socks: Ask your child to bring their hands into tight fists, squeezing their big emotions into rocks. Then ask your
  • child to relax their hands into floppy socks, letting go of tension they just felt.

When coping skills and brave actions are practiced at home, children can learn to face their fears, take risks and gain confidence.

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