Nina's Approach
Some of the approaches used by Nina's Nurture alongside the Mindful Monkeys® Better Together Programme.
Nina's approach
At the heart of Nina's Nurture is a focus on wellbeing, relationships, and a drive to support the growth and development of loving and strong connections within your family.
The nurturing approaches I will use will be the golden threads that run through my programme, and I will guide and support you on the journey to achieving long term emotional stability and happiness within your home.
During 1:1 family sessions or group sessions we will explore strategies and techniques that will enable parents to create emotionally happy and healthy home environments.
The practical activities and session content will empower parents to build strong relationships, encourage positive connections within the family based on effective communication and develop empathy, resilience and self-esteem in themselves and their children.
This will be achieved using three main approaches:
1. Teaching you how to use mindfulness as a tool to support your child's emotional wellbeing
2. Using story books to help your child develop emotional literacy and,
3. Using the framework offered by the Mindful Monkeys® Better Together Programme.
Typically when I engage with a family it will take the following format:
Benefits of mindfulness
During the past several years, I have been teaching mindfulness and relaxation techniques to children across all year groups within my school. Mindfulness can be defined as having the ability to be fully present, aware of where we are and what we are doing, and not being overly reactive or overwhelmed by what is going on around us. I have seen first-hand how mindfulness can nourish children's emotional and mental wellbeing helping them to regulate and manage their emotions and feel a sense of calm.
Practising mindfulness activities teaches children to accept their emotions and experience in the moment without critical or negative judgement. This allows children space and time to acknowledge and sit with their strong feelings and emotions and therefore as a result helps them to process and work through them. With increased awareness of how they are feeling in the moment, comes less emotional reactivity and a greater ability to listen and communicate more thoughtfully and effectively. Teaching these vital skills to our children gives them the ability to self-regulate so that they can effectively manage their own mood, emotions, and upsets in a healthy productive way.
During our 1:1 or group sessions we can work through a range of different mindfulness activities together and I can also provide MP3 stories and other suggested practise for you to use at home in between our weekly sessions.
Benefits of using stories to help develop emotional literacy
Emotional literacy is about being able to understand, identify and label the emotions we feel. Empathy is the ability to understand other people's emotions. One potential way of fostering empathy and strong emotional literacy is through using picture books. Research has shown that picture books offer a unique opportunity to engage with empathy as they show us images and characters that help us understand people in real life. During my one to one or group sessions I have an extensive collection of beautiful books that I may read that provide a safe and supportive way for your child to learn how to express and think about their emotions.
The Mindful Monkeys® Better Together programme
The Mindful Monkeys® Better Together programme is a strength-based programme designed to support children who are struggling with issues such as anxiety, anger, low self-esteem and regulating their emotions.
The Mindful Monkeys® Better Together programme empowers parents to build positive relationships, encourages co-operative behaviour, develop resilience, empathy and self-esteem in their children and themselves. It also helps to foster strong connections and relationships within the whole family.
This programme is fully explained in the following section The Mindful Monkeys® Better Together programme.
