However, many of these strategies are broad and can be incorporated or adopted into everyday parenting or teaching practices — such as: ● Create an environment where your child feels safe and comfortable to discuss their feelings. When a child feels safe they ask questions, learn to trust, share their feelings, and ask for help more readily. ● Become familiar with different ways you can help build and nurture your child’s self-esteem and emotional security. You can make your child feel more valued and supported by being approachable and available in times of need or when they reach out for comfort. ● Be a good role model. While your child will learn to model the behaviours they observe in you and others, they need to be explicitly taught social and emotional skills such as showing kindness to others, having good manners, listening to others, being cooperative, being respectful of self and others, and understanding how others may feel (empathy). ● Focus on strengths. Create opportunities (every day) for your child to do and be more of the things they enjoy or are good at. Focusing on strengths rather than weaknesses helps your child feel good about who they are. ● Frequently remind your child they are loved, appreciated, and valued for simply being their beautiful and unique self! Please tell us about your latest books! Ooooooo – how exciting! My new collection of books is called the My Emotions Series and explains big feelings for little people. This ground-breaking new series equips children (and their associated grown-ups) with valuable skills to navigate their way through life’s inevitable ups and downs — from grieving and anxiety to self-esteem and resilience. The My Emotion Series explores the layers of emotions that typically accompany a life experience or event. It offers wellresearched techniques to help children develop coping skills and build resilience — so that when the experience inevitably happens, your child feels better prepared and has more confidence to manage their emotions. The first four books in the series are The Grief Wave (about grief and loss); Little Big Bully (about bullying); I Am Me (about self-esteem and how to grow it); and Poo Poo Happens (about resilience and how to become more resilient). There are six other exciting titles currently in production. The content within each title of the My Emotions Series is based on leading academic research and studies. Each book includes an activity that helps calm or empower the reader, and informative notes to parents and caregivers that provide grown-ups with an incredible toolkit of advice for supporting children through their emotions. What are the main messages you hope readers – both children and adults – get from this series? This series is primarily promoting and encouraging preparedness for inevitable life experiences and events. In other words — we ALL experience these things at some stage throughout our lifetime, and therefore — it is enormously helpful to have some sound coping skills tucked up our sleeves that we can apply when needed. I hope that newly learned skills and information is talked about and shared with family and friends — and encourages open conversation about stuff that matters! “Every day, in every way, we seek acknowledgment that we matter.” Trace Moroney has been writing, illustrating and publishing children’s picture books that focus on social and emotional intelligence for almost twenty years. Her bestselling The Feelings Series and the incredibly successful The Things I Love Series can be found on bookshelves the world over with more than ten million copies of her books having been sold worldwide and translated into over twenty-two languages in twenty-nine countries. ABOUT THE AUTHOR March 2022 { 32 }
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