The boy who knew…

I have been blown away recently by a little boy who is able to articulate so beautifully what it is like to be him. He has a special skill in being able to describe how he feels and what his body needs and I wanted to share this to inspire us all to really listen to our children and look for how they are telling us what they need.

By listening I mean listening with our eyes as well as our ears as not everyone has the vocabulary to label sensations and emotions but their actions can tell us.

Over the past few months this little boy has shared that he has felt sad. Sad but he doesn’t know why. Sad and it doesn’t feel like a nice feeling at all. In fact he described it as a deep dark sadness inside him. This caused some alarm all round and the quest was on to figure it out. But he wasn’t quite ready to share more - he hadn’t figured it out for himself yet so we kept talking, we kept listening, we kept modelling our own emotional states and body sensations.

He has now been able to explain that he needs to move his body and how happy he feels is based on how much his body has been able to move. While telling me this he was sitting next to me and wiggling his toes and this became the jumping off point for his description.

“If I can only move my body a little, I only feel a little happy”

“If I can move more of my body then I feel a medium bit happy”

“If I can move my body a lot, I feel happy”

Happy is his word for feeling regulated. We can understand this to mean that his brain and body feels in a good place. This means that he will be more able to listen, to learn, to think flexibly and to get through the day successfully.

Different children will need different things at different times. Watching and learning from what they are telling us with their words as well as their actions. I can also really help if we as the grown-ups can also become more aware of what our own bodies are telling us as this can lead to some wonderfully curious conversations.

Katy x