How to Improve Social Health and Emotional Wellbeing

May 12, 2022 byMorgan Champion

4 min to read

A father helping his two sons with school work

While a robust academic curriculum is important for your child, there are other skills that factor into a student’s success both in school and in life. For a child to be successful and thrive, learning and understanding key social emotional wellness behaviors such as coping, managing emotions through gratitude, or adjusting one’s mindset based on what they can control, are critical for student well-being.

What Is Social Emotional Wellness?

Social emotional wellness is a person’s ability to understand and manage their emotions, make responsible decisions, build and maintain relationships, and understand and empathize with others. These skills help young people and adults to achieve their goals, develop healthy identities, and manage emotions.

Tips for Improving the Social-Emotional Well-Being of Students

As we strive to normalize mental health conversations and support the whole student—not just academically, but socially and emotionally, Connections Academy developed tips on how you can improve your child’s social and emotional wellbeing.

1. Instill Coping Skills

Helping students and children develop coping skills for stress, anxiety, anger, and other unpleasant emotions can set them up for positive emotional regulation in the long-term. Consider these simple activities that can help children develop coping skills, along with being fun:

Help them learn and practice positive self-talk (“I can handle this.” “I can do this.”)
Journal or write a letter to someone in your family, or even a historical figure
Clean, declutter, and organize
Do a puzzle
Cook or bake

2. Start a gratitude practice

Research proves that gratitude has the ability to positively impact the brain and wellbeing. At the start or conclusion of each day, have your child write at least three things they are grateful for and encourage them to discuss with family or friends.

3. Practice the “circle of control” exercise

Amid the uncertainty of current events, teaching children to focus on what’s within their control can help them feel safe, centered, and can ease the anxieties of the unknown. To practice the circle of control, simply draw a circle and have the child write within the circle all the things that they can control (their attitude, finding fun things to do at home, following social distancing, etc.). For outside the circle, they write everything that is outside of their control (what’s in stock at the grocery store, how long this will last, etc). Work with the child to create actionable ideas on what they can do within their own circle of control.

4. Initiate self-care practices

Self-care is not limited to adults, and children should feel empowered to integrate activities that make them feel happy and healthy. Ideas include:

Do some light exercises every day
Limit TV time and read a book instead
Take a relaxing bath
Celebrate the small daily wins

5. Take mindfulness breaks

Mindfulness helps children calm down, while also allowing information to more freely flow to the prefrontal cortex, better enabling them to make good choices and retain information. Set mindfulness breaks throughout the child’s day to check in where they are mentally. Ask them to stop and stretch, or even take a few cleansing breaths. There are a variety of age-appropriate videos on mindfulness online. Some of my favorites include:

Mindfulness with Mindful Ozzy (Grades K-3)
Fablefy’s Two Minutes of Mindfulness (Grades 6-8)
Mr. Colin Dodd’s Snowy Mindful Minute (Grades 9-12)

6. Facilitate safe socialization.

Remember, much of your child’s time at school is about having fun and socializing with friends. Ease their longing to play with their friends via technology tools that allow socialization from afar, such as Zoom, Google Hangouts, or FaceTime on a computer or phone. Ideas include:

Schedule FaceTime dinner parties with friends and family
Host a virtual show-and-tell or talent show
Take virtual field trips to museums or foreign countries
Create fun themed dress-up days

Supporting the Social Emotional Health of Your Student

By creating life lessons out of the present times to foster your child’s ability to adapt and change, these social and emotional wellbeing skills will help foster your child’s ability to adapt and change far into the future. A lack of social and emotional well-being in a student can make it hard for them to find success later in life.

Connections Academy knows just how important these life skills are to developing confident and capable adults, so our learning experience is designed with that in mind and tailored to supporting each student’s individual needs. Find out if virtual school is right for your child – take our online quiz today!

Morgan Champion is the Manager of Counseling for Connections Academy Schools. In her role, she supports counselors across the country to implement best practices within their schools related to academic, social/emotional, and college and career readiness. As a previous school administrator, counselor, and teacher, Morgan is passionate about helping students develop skills to be resilient while supporting parents in fostering these traits in their children.