Your family narrative

Your family has a story, a narrative. This story includes how and when the parents met, how the children came into the family (birth, adoption, foster, step…), positive times (vacations that went well, accomplishments, awards…), negative times (when someone lost a job, death of a pet, dealing with a disability, life challenges…), everyday life (favorite games, pizza night, birthdays…), core values (we worship weekly, nightly dinner together is important, we volunteer our time…), and much more.

Instead of reading or writing about other people, read, write, talk about your family. Some people write about their families to preserve family history. Some people write about their families as a way to sort out their feelings and beliefs about their past.

Another important reason to read, write, or talk about your family is to help your children. Learning about or writing about family can provide them with a background for the family’s values and it can help integrate their place in the family.

Ways to tell your family story:

• Pick a segment of your family’s history (when Grandma and Grandpa first got married, when your child joined the family, the winter we got snowed in…), pop some popcorn, and turn telling the story into a family get-together.
• Turn your child’s story into a multi-part story that you tell them over several nights as you tuck them in. Tell them about when you first saw her. Share about his early milestones. Describe what you liked about her when she was little. Talk about his accomplishments. Project into the future and share your hopes for her future.
• Create a slide presentation, gather the family around, and get everyone to share memories and stories.
• Have your child create a book of their life or the family as they know it. Have them write or type it up, and illustrate it. It can be shared with the immediate family or given to grandparents as a gift.

A family’s narrative is important to everyone. But it can be especially important for newly-adopted or foster children to hear, or when the family goes through changes, whether positive or negative. Become a family that narrates their own story as a way to celebrate, join together, and move through challenges.

******

RESOURCE

You Can Write Your Family History

Emotions described in acrostic poems

Wrote poems about mad, sad, glad, scared, and ashamed

Tried this poem-writing activity with a 14-year-old boy who struggles to identify and articulate him emotions. The result was five poems written about mad, sad, glad, scared, and ashamed. Several things happened before writing the poems to help him become familiar with feelings and the bodily sensations that go along with emotions. We discussed emotions and the different ways they can impact your body: tense, tight, tears, tingly, hot, cold, etc. Then we read several children’s books about emotions. His last exercise before writing the poems was to draw stick people to depict mad, sad, glad, scared, and ashamed, with the most important aspect the facial expression.

The poetry exercise began with showing him an acrostic poem where each letter of a person’s name or a word become the first letter of a line of poetry. For example, tree, might become a poem like this:

Tree

They are big or sometimes small
Reaching always for the sky
Every kind grows in the park
Each one has leaves, a trunk, and roots.

The boy wrote one acrostic poem using his name to describe himself, then another poem using the word “rain.” Next,  I asked him to write one poem for each of the main emotion words we had discussed and that he had drawn pictures of. The result was close to astonishing! This boy who, a short time ago, described everything as being either sad or happy, and when asked how emotions felt in his body said, “Can’t feel anything,” could now distinguish nuances of emotions! When I asked him what he thought about his poems, he said, “I feel very proud!” And, he should!

Here are two examples of what he wrote:

Glad

Gives you energy
Let’s you laugh
Always makes you smile
Does not make you feel lonely.

Scared

Sometimes can make you cry
Can make you nervous
And make you tense
Reminds you of scary thoughts about it
Even can make you shake
Does not make you feel relaxed.

The process of having to think about different ways to describe an emotion helps embed it in the child’s brain. The more opportunities we give a child to articulate and talk about his or her emotions, the less potential their is for acting out those emotions inappropriately.

Building a sense of self through writing

If your child is struggling due to stress, grief, behavioral issues, or big life questions, they may not be sure who they are. Sometimes it’s more than low self esteem, but a lack of self… an inability to figure out what they like, what they’re good at, or even what their favorite food is.

Help your child along. Give her or him a few questions to answer or writing prompts or drawing assignments about themselves. Don’t use these as opportunities to tell your child that their self-perceptions are incorrect or should change. Instead, thank them for sharing and suggest they tell you more, either through writing or talking. The goal is just to give them a deeper sense of who they are, a deeper sense of self, and ultimately, improved self-esteem.

Suggest one or more of the following to your child:

• Draw a picture of yourself.
• Draw a picture of you and your family.
• When it’s sunny, I like to __________.
• My favorite place to go for vacation is __________.
• I love to eat __________.
• My feet like to __________.
• I’d like to invent __________.
• If I could make a movie it would be called __________.
• I’d like to write a book about __________.
• Someday, I hope I can __________.
• Write about a time you were helpful and how it made you feel.
• Write about a time you were sad and why.
• Imagine you could go back in history. Who would you like to meet and what would you ask that person?

A child writing about himself or herself could be a one-time activity, or you could get them a journal and have them write one thing every day about themselves. Remember, the idea is not for you to try and change how they think about themselves or to dispute what they write, but rather to give them new opportunities to  think about who they are and who they would like to be, developing an improved sense of self.

RESOURCES:

Kid’s Health: Developing Your Child’s Self Esteem

Oh, The Places You’ll Go by Dr. Seuss