Navigating Mental Health and Developing Resilience for Your 6-Year-Old

Now Is the Right Time!

Six-year-olds are learning many new things, like making friends, understanding feelings, and starting school. These experiences can be exciting and sometimes a little scary. Children can begin to understand and take care of their mental health by talking about emotions and learning simple ways to feel better.

Children between the ages of five and ten are experiencing lots of changes as they grow, like learning new things in school, making friends, and understanding their feelings. These changes can sometimes feel big and even a little overwhelming, especially without tools to help manage emotions. Your support as a parent or someone in a parenting role is essential in helping them learn how to take care of their mental health and build strong emotional skills.

Sometimes, tough things like family challenges or difficult experiences can affect a child’s mental health. Getting professional support can be helpful if your family is going through something challenging. The steps here, though, can guide you in helping your child develop everyday skills to handle feelings and build resilience.

Why Mental Health?

Mental health is just as important as physical health! Children face challenges like feeling nervous about school, getting frustrated with friends, or dealing with big feelings. Helping your child learn about mental health can help them:

• Feel calm and confident about handling their feelings
• Make and keep friends by learning empathy and kind communication
• Understand their own feelings and why they feel a certain way

Your child is learning to identify their feelings and find words to express them. Teaching emotional awareness helps them communicate effectively and prevents them from becoming overwhelmed by strong emotions. By learning simple coping strategies early on, your child can handle setbacks or disappointments more easily and develop confidence in their ability to manage difficult situations. The coping skills and emotional tools you help your child develop now can stay with them throughout their lives. Early mental health habits, like talking about feelings or using calming techniques, set the stage for stronger mental health in adolescence and adulthood.

By focusing on mental health at this stage, parents and those in a parenting role are helping their children feel supported, capable, and ready to handle whatever comes their way, creating a foundation for lifelong well-being.

Five Steps for Mental Health

These five steps can help your child build skills that support their mental health and make them more resilient.

Ask your child questions to help them understand and express their feelings. This process promotes self-awareness and encourages them to recognize emotions in others.

Questions to Ask:

• “What made you happy or excited today?”
• “Did anything make you feel a little sad or frustrated?”
• “Is there something you felt worried about today?”
• “What do you think that person (or character in a book or on TV) is feeling?”
• “Why do you think that person reacted that way? Do you think they could have done something different?”

Active Listening: Show you’re listening by repeating back what they say. For example, “It sounds like you felt sad when you couldn’t play the game you wanted. That must have been hard.”

Help your child learn to recognize and manage emotions with hands-on examples.

Naming the Emotion: Teach your child to label feelings, like saying, “I’m feeling happy” or “I’m feeling frustrated.” You can use a feelings chart to help your child name their feelings.

Sitting with the Feeling: Explain that feelings are okay and normal. For example, say, “It’s okay to feel a little mad when something doesn’t go our way.” Explain that talking about the feeling helps not react to the emotion.

Shifting the Emotion: Show them how to feel better by doing calming activities like drawing, listening to music, or taking deep breaths. Help your child learn to “shake it off” so they don’t get stuck in the feeling – using an example of how a dog shakes after getting scared can help make this idea fun and easy to understand.

Actions to Practice:

• Model naming your own feelings, like “I’m feeling a bit tired, so I’ll take a quick break.”
• Teach simple calming actions, like counting to five, imagining their favorite place, or taking a break.
• Once you’ve talked about it, help your child move past the emotion by shifting your own emotion and engaging in something different with your child. For example, you both could draw together, go on a walk, play a game, or talk about something different.

To reinforce mental health strategies, it’s important to practice regularly. This can take the form of role-playing, reflecting on emotions, or simply incorporating calming practices into daily routines.

Actions:

• Start a daily check-in where you each share one happy moment or one tough moment.
• Talk about how feelings can change, like, “You seemed nervous before school, but you looked happy afterward. How come?”
• Recognize their efforts, e.g., “I noticed you took deep breaths when you felt upset. That was a great way to calm down!”

Continue to offer support as your child applies these new mental health skills. Monitor how they are doing, and be ready to reteach or adjust strategies when necessary.

Actions:

• Remind them that it’s okay to take breaks when they feel upset, like “If you feel overwhelmed, let’s take a moment to breathe.”
• On challenging days, ask, “Is there something that made today hard? Let’s figure out a way to feel better together.”

No matter how old your child is, your positive reinforcement and encouragement have a significant impact.

If your child is working to grow their skills – even in small ways – it will be worthwhile to recognize it. Your recognition can go a long way in promoting positive behaviors and expanding your child’s confidence. Your recognition also promotes safe, secure, and nurturing relationships — a foundation for strong communication and a healthy relationship with you as they grow.

There are many ways to reinforce your child’s efforts. It is essential to distinguish between three types of reinforcement: recognition, rewards, and bribes. These three distinct parenting behaviors have different impacts on your child’s behavior.

Recognition occurs after you observe the desired behavior in your child. Noticing and naming the specific behavior you want to reinforce is key to promoting more of it. For example, “I’m really proud of how you sat with your frustration earlier rather than avoiding it!”  Recognition can include nonverbal acknowledgment, such as a smile or hug.

Rewards can be helpful in certain situations by providing a concrete, timely, and positive incentive for doing a good job.  A reward is determined beforehand so the child knows what to expect. It stops any negotiations in the heat of the moment.  A reward could be used to teach positive behavior or break a bad habit. The goal should be to help your child progress to a time when the reward will no longer be needed. If used too often, rewards can decrease a child’s internal motivation.

Unlike a reward, bribes aren’t planned ahead of time and generally happen when a parent or someone in a parenting role is in the middle of a crisis. While bribes can be helpful in the short term to manage stressful situations, they will not grow lasting motivation or behavior change and should be avoided.

Actions:

• Highlight specific successes, like “I’m proud of how you handled it when your friend didn’t want to play. That was very patient of you.”
• Reward their effort with quality time, like reading together or playing a game they enjoy.
• Offer specific praise, saying, “It was brave of you to tell me you were feeling scared instead of holding it inside.”

Closing

Supporting mental health and building resilience is a journey. By following these steps, you’re helping your child learn to handle their feelings and gain skills they’ll use in the future. Encouraging mental health skills now prepares them for life’s challenges with resilience and self-awareness.