Colourful Feelings - A Parent’s Guide to Educating and Supporting Infant Mental Health

References by Monique Staples & Michaela Myles   Bethany Hope Centre. (2021). From Cradle to College. Retrieved March 31, 2021, from https://bethanyhopecentre.org/ Buffalo Schools. (n.d.). Questions from the Movie "Inside Out". Retrieved March 31, 2021, from https://www.buffaloschools.org/site/handlers/filedownload.ashx?moduleinstanceid=8596&dataid=45486&FileName=inside_out_movie_questions.pdf First 5 LA. (2020, August 06). Building Resilience and Decreasing Childhood Trauma. Retrieved April 2, 2021, from https://www.first5la.org/article/building-resilience-and-childhood-trauma/ Harvard University. (2015, June 19). Retrieved March 31, 2021, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L41k2p-YRCs Kelty Mental Health Cetnre. (2021). Infant Mental Health. Retrieved April 2, 2021, from https://keltymentalhealth.ca/infant-mental-health KidCentral TN. (2018). Mental Health & Emotional Health. Retrieved April 2, 2021, from https://www.kidcentraltn.com/health.html#mental-emo...

Ottawa Community Resources by Monique Staples & Michaela Myles They say it takes a village to raise a child. The same can be said about nurturing strong mental health within your children. It can feel daunting to find all of these resources by yourself to support your family's mental health - it is for this reason we felt we should bring the village to you! Listed below are three incredibly Ottawa based community resources to help you feel supported as you educate your children about their colourful feelings. Bethany Hope Centre https://bethanyhopecentre.org/ 820 Woodroffe Ave, Ottawa, ON K2A 3V7 CA (613) 725-1733 "From Cradle to College - The Bethany Hope Centre exists to improve the well being of pregnant youth and young parent families" (Bethany Hope Centre, 2021, Home Page). The Bethany Hope Centre offers educational, financial, nutritional, and emotional support to the diverse styles of young parent families in Ottawa. Whether you are looking for support for your...

Worksheets, Tools, and Resources to Help Your Children Understand Their Colourful Feelings by Monique Staples & Michaela Myles Actively engaging your children in activities focused on learning to label their emotions will provide them with the language they need to express their emotional state with you and to learn coping skills to self-regulate. The first step is to learn to identify the emotion. Get creative! Arts and crafts can be a fun way to explore the various rainbow of human emotion! Visual Cards for Managing Feelings Use these free printable "How do I feel today?" sheets to facilitate exercises with children to artistically express their thoughts and feelings on that particular day. They can draw a face, a color, a picture, or anything else that represents how they feel. You can also cue them to draw specific emotions and put each face on a popsicle stick so that they can use them as masks to help identify their emotions in the heat of an intense moment.  This i...

  Online Resources to Support Your Child’s Mental Health by Monique Staples & Michaela Myles The first step to supporting your child’s mental health is making sure you are educated around infant mental health. Below there are a variety of online resources available to help educate yourself so that you might start to educate your children on the importance of infant mental health. InBrief: Early Childhood Mental Health https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L41k2p-YRCs To begin, here is a summary of Infant Mental Health: what it is, why it is important to support, and what are the early signs of infant mental health problems. This video will provide you with a foundation of knowledge as you start to create your toolkit of infant mental health support (Harvard University, 2015). Infant and Early Mental Health Promotion https://imhpromotion.ca/ Toronto Sick Kids’ hospital has a web resource called Infant and Early Mental Health Promotion where they have searchable catalogs of information...