Mental Health

“Failure is the opportunity to begin again more intelligently” — Henry Ford

7 Skills for Successful Kids –How parents and guardians can focus on encouraging successful kids and give them the tools and resources to handle difficult situations and emotions.  

  • Self-Confidence: Boosting self-esteem and confidence increases academic success and overall genuine happiness. Encouraging self-confidence helps kids to identify failure as a challenge and not an obstacle and rebound. 
  • Empathy: Help learners develop an emotional vocabulary to develop empathy by labeling emotions, asking questions, sharing feelings, and noticing others.
      1. Affective Empathy: share another’s feelings and feel their emotions.
      2. Behavioral Empathy: when empathic concern rallies us to act with compassion. 
      3. Cognitive Empathy: when we understand another’s thoughts and step into their shoes.
  • Self-Control: The ability to control your emotions, behaviors, attention, thoughts and desires. To develop this, it enables learners to bounce back and thrive. Help them by developing signals to stop and pause or create stress pauses that teach them to stop and think before acting.  
  • Integrity: Set of learned beliefs, capacities, attitudes and skills that create a moral compass. Lay out expectations and call out behaviors that show integrity. 
  • Curiosity: Recognition, pursuit, and desire to explore challenging and uncertain events. Use open-ended toys and model inquisitiveness. 
  • Perseverance: Helps kids to keep on even when it is easier to give up. Instead of allowing them to catastrophize the event, help them to identify the problem and think of strategies to handle this. Have them chunk assignments or place the most difficult task at the top of their to-do list.
  • Optimism: View challenges as temporary and able to be overcome, allowing students to be more likely to succeed.

“Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.” — Thomas A. Edison

Resources and Blogs

Colorado SKIES Academy
Colorado SKIES Academy is a free public charter school authorized by the Cherry Creek School District, open to students throughout the Arapahoe County and Douglas County areas. This STEAM middle school serving grades 6-8 is located at Centennial Airport next to Wings Over the Rockies Exploration of Flight.
Colorado SKIES Academy

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