Children experience big emotions and sometimes these emotions exacerbate communication and feeding challenges. Learning breathing and relaxation strategies can help children feel calmer and better equipped to navigate challenging communication and feeding situations.
How Does Relaxation Work?
When we feel anxious, we might notice that our breathing gets quicker, out heart beats faster and our muscles feel tense. This is called our fight or flight response and happens when our body thinks we are in danger. For some children this fight or flight response happens in response to certain communication or feeding situations and makes it difficult for them to participate in everyday situations.
Relaxation strategies work by calming our body down when it has gone into fight or flight mode. If you feel that your child would benefit from relaxation and calming strategies, below are some ideas for you to try.
Breathing Strategies
- Balloon Breathing – Ask your child to place their hands on their tummy and as they breath in, ask them to imagine their tummy is being blown up like a balloon. When they breath out, they can imagine their tummy is deflating like a balloon.
- Windmills – Encourage your child to breath in deeply through their nose and then slowly breath out through their mouth as if blowing to make a windmill turn round.
- Five Finger Breathing – Have your child place their hand on the table. As you slowly trace your finger along the edges of their fingers have them breath in when you trace along one side of their finger and breath out when you trace along the other side. As your child becomes skilled at this, they can use their own finger to trace their hand.
- Calm Breathing – Sometimes a child’s breathing can become fast and shallow when anxious. Support your child to use ‘calm breathing’ by practising taking slow, deep breaths from the stomach.
Mindfulness
Mindfulness is about focusing on the present and paying attention to what is happening in your body and how you feel. It is another relaxation technique that can support children to feel calm and focused when faced with anxiety or a difficult situation. A helpful mindfulness technique is ‘Five Things.’
- Ask your child to look around and name five things they can see.
- Next, ask them to name four things they can touch or feel.
- Next ask them to name three things they can hear.
- Next ask them to name two things they can smell.
- Lastly ask them to take one long, slow breath in and out.
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