Mr H, being a communicator by trade, is always reading books about human behaviour. He recently read out this sentence to me from a book by Jonathan Haidt called The Righteous Mind (the fun we have in our house!): “We are deeply intuitive creatures whose gut feelings drive our strategic reasoning.” It really connected with me because, as someone who has struggled with my mental health all my life, I know how true this is. On any day, my feelings…
Tonight we had chicken stir fry for dinner. Mr H had spent 20 minutes cooking a lovely meal that we could all enjoy as a family. And it was a yummy dinner. Mr H and I ate the whole thing. However, Little Mister H was not happy about his dinner. He clearly wanted fish fingers and chips or jacket potato with cheese and beans. So he became angry and ended up throwing some of his food at me. He’s a…
I recently wrote a post about why I’m passionate about our children developing emotional intelligence. I believe it’s crucial for them to understand their emotions and know how to deal with them correctly. To help us on this journey to developing Little Mister H and Little Miss H’s emotional intelligence I will be working with Skylark Learning. And we will be using their My First Emotions Box to help Little Miss and Little Mister become emotionally intelligent. As part of…
As a society, we value intelligence. And once our children start school we want them to do well academically. We help them learn to read and we show them how to write their name. Evenings are spent practising spellings and times tables. Yet we rarely teach our children about emotional intelligence. From an early age, we shhh them when they cry. We tell our children to be quiet when they’re angry. And we often use negative language to describe their emotions. They’re…
I’ve been quite open recently that my mental health hasn’t been brilliant. It certainly isn’t terrible but I haven’t been myself. I’ve been feeling anxious and unmotivated. There have been days when I have felt tearful, unable to control my mood and I have just wanted to clamber back into bed and sleep. My Mental Health There are many small reasons why my depression has relapsed. The stress and sadness of the recurrent miscarriages and the anxiety I felt in my…