Tag: social health

Reframe It!™: A Game for Parents Looking to Solve Behavior Problems

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Reframe It!™ game reduces anxiety and boosts social emotional mental health!

Reframing is a social-emotional mental health tool or strategy that helps to understand the function of human behavior. The American Psychology Association defines reframing as “a process of reconceptualizing a problem by seeing it from a different perspective.” This, then, creates possibilities for parents and others to solve child problem behaviors. Reframing shows how to foresee behavior and bypass it while building empathy and reducing anxiety.

As a parent, I loved learning about reframing. It showed me ways to try to get to the source of my child’s behavior problems. I was able to predict what might happen and diffuse their triggers.  It also helped me improve relationships with family members and friends. Reframing showed me how by to see behaviors from another’s perspective.  I enjoyed learning and teaching reframing so much that I developed “Reframe It!™,”* a game that teaches reframing. It shows a way to see why children or adults behave the way they do. The games also helps to build compassion for others and ourselves.

Reframe It!™ is a fun game!

“Reframe It!™” is a game for parents and others who are parenting to help them understand child behavior and behavior problems. The game can also help parents understand their own behavior, building self-compassion.  With reframing, we gain an understanding of “the function of behavior,” or why people – children and adults – do what they do.

An aws Studios.art cartoon illustration showing a bunch of celery reframing two onions with behavior problems

Reframe It!™ offers players:

  • A chance to think about ways to modify their reactions to challenging or problem behaviors
  • Ways to predict difficult behaviors and then
  • Make changes to the environment or situation to bypass potential problems.
  • For example:

A parent learns that sibling conflicts often arise from children seeking attention or they are bored or jealous. The parent sees the connection and plans ahead to give each child positive attention regularly. Or they change the environment by helping the child engage in a personally stimulating activity.

Reframe It!™ objectives include helping parents:

  • Learn about reframing.
  • Learn how to reframe behaviors to understand the function of behavior.
  • Begin a practice of reframing to help plan for and modify behavior/reactions and the environment.
  • Build empathy.
  • Build an understanding of personal behavior and “why we do what we do.”
  • Enter into discussions about behavior, stress, family roles, tasks, conflict or anger management, etc.
  • Increase comfort in communicating with each other.
  • Improve parent-child communication.

More about reframing here, here and here!

Click here to purchase Reframe It!, a downloadable pdf for $12.00

* Reframe It!™ is a trademark of aws Studios and was developed using the child and parent behavior reframes in Intervening with troubled families: Functional family therapy and Parenting Wisely. D.A. Gordon, author. 2003.

A Mental Health Toolbox for Social and Emotional Health and Well-being

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Even if you are at risk for mental illness, you can maintain your social and emotional well-being by learning and practicing mental health skills.

At the 2022 Mental Health America conference last week, “Forward Together – Recovery, Healing, Hope,” Kristen Harootunian, a young adult from Minding Your Mind, told a powerful and hopeful “story” titled, “Changing Minds: Stories Over Stigma.” Kristen related her experience with health, mental illness, substance abuse, and her subsequent recovery.

Mental Health Toolbox

  • First, young people should connect with 1-3 trusted adults. They could be parents, teachers, counselors, clergy, family members, or friends.
  • “Letting people in and meeting help halfway”:  Kristen talked about how she thought she had to do things on her own and was alone in her struggles. When she opened up to her friends, she wasn’t expecting their support. Instead, they listened and gave her love and compassion. In therapy, Kristen found she wasn’t alone – that many young people deal with struggles similar to hers. Getting help with her emotional health or “letting people in” was what she needed to survive.
A grumpy onion. He could use a toolbox!

Five positive coping skills

  • Kristen’s five positive coping skills:
    • Exercise,
    • Walking,
    • Reading,
    • Connecting with family and friends
    • Journaling: When asked how she was doing, Kristen usually responded with, “I’m fine.” But actually, she was hiding or masking her true feelings. Writing or journaling helped her express her feelings, including guilt (of her mother’s death), shame, substance abuse, pressure, isolation, emptiness, trauma, anxiety, sadness, guardedness, grief, and tiredness. Getting these feelings down on paper helped her work through them and, for the most part, out of them.
Looks like a trusted bunch of celery?

How about you?

Creating a toolbox of mental health skills isn’t difficult. It’s easy and can be a fun use of time. How about you? Do you have a toolbox of skills to help you maintain your mental health? Are they like the tools in Kristen’s box, or are they different? I would love to hear about what’s in your toolbox in the Comments section below!

Thanks for tuning in, and feel free to share this post to help boost mental health skill-building everywhere!

“Square breathing or box breathing,” a technique to help calm our bodies and brains down when starting to feel anxious:  4 beats inhale, 4 beats hold, 4 beats exhale, 4 beats hold, and repeat.

Kristen says these tools help her maintain her recovery, but, as she alludes in her presentation, they would have been helpful to know at an early age to provide strategies to protect against mental illness.