Teaching Self-Talk to Children

Teaching Self-Talk to Children. Positive self-talk is one of the most important interior skills a person can have.  Unfortunately, it rarely, if ever, gets taught.  Since we listen to ourselves far more than we listen to anyone else, it’s an essential skill to have.  When we have positive self-talk, almost any situation can be handled with confidence and peace.  When we lack it, we can quickly become dependent on others for affirmation and validation.  At best, that positions a child to be a follower in the crowd and, at worst, leaves a child vulnerable to teasing and bullying, which can be quite destructive and traumatizing.

If you haven’t already, you might want to listen to my podcasts, How to Talk to Yourself and How to Talk to Mean Voices, because learning to talk to yourself in a healthy way will help you teach the same to your child.  The most effective self-talk isn’t just talking to yourself but from your true/wise self.  That means speaking from a calm, confident, and compassionate place to whatever part of us struggles.

Here are a few principles to teach children for positive self-talk:

• Emotions are information.
  
• Emotions are only one source of information.
  
• We have emotions. We aren’t emotions.
  
• The true/wise self can see the information the emotional part is struggling with and can also present other information.
  
• Personify the emotions for the sake of being able to treat them compassionately.
  

The autonomy, self-efficacy, emotional regulation, and confidence that can come from practicing positive self-talk is hard to overstate.  The first young child I used this with was my nephew when he was three years old and by it, he resolved what had become a dramatic situation quite quickly and peacefully.  I was astounded.  Listen to the podcast to hear the story.  I had a young mother tell me she had similar results with her five-year-old daughter.  I think the only reason it might sound complicated to us as adults is because we may have had years of believing we really are the emotions we’re experiencing, relying on others to soothe us, or even believing that we’re mentally unstable if we talk to ourselves.

Teach your child to talk to himself as Jesus would talk to him and you won’t regret it and he won’t either.

May the Lord give you peace!

Margaret

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