Episode 51: How to Help Your Kids with Self-regulation

This week, Jodi speaks with Kristi Coppa, founder of Wondergrade. Wondergrade is an app that teaches Self-regulation skills to kids and their parents. In this episode, Kristi offers insight into how to teach your child Self-regulation, calming, and coping skills. She shares concrete tools and strategies to help parents and children alike and also discusses how and when to foster these practices with our children so that they can use them properly throughout their lives.

Shoutout to reviewer: New yawk photographr

About Our Guest:
Kristi Coppa is a mother of two young girls, a kids mindfulness teacher, speaker, writer, and former nurse. Kristi is also the founder of Wondergrade, a digital health and education company that teaches young kids coping and self-regulation skills. She recently released the Wondergrade app, to help parents teach calm-down and self-regulation skills to their kids at home and is in the process of writing a curriculum to help teachers bring social-emotional skills into the classroom. Kristi is a native of the Pacific Northwest. She loves being outside and spends most weekends hiking, camping, wine tasting, or romping around the coast with her husband, girls, and St. Bernard, Sampson.  

 5:00: Kristi’s background that led her to her work
"I've worked with a lot of therapists and teachers, and really was working with how we can make this information really accessible and come to life for kids"

9:15: Recognizing your child's possible stress and worries
"Educating yourself [about how your child's stress] and how that shows up in your child's body is a really powerful (...) And what that looks like is usually being patient with yourself, and after an incident happens, going back and talking to their kid about it"

14:30: How to teach self regulation and coping skills to kids
"I use a lot of these guided visualizations with kids where we are doing something else, pretending that we're something else, while we're working on a skill"

18:15: Identifying the best times to teach these skills
"The absolute best time to practice a new skill is when your kid is at their happiest: So when they're fed, when they are well rested. And that's when they're going to be the most receptive to learning, that's different for every kid, but most young kids, that's like mid morning-ish time like after breakfast"

20:45: Coping techniques
In this section, Kristi walks through calm down techniques such as squeezing lemons, elephant bends, and  hand presses

24:15: Kristi’s app, Wondergrade
"It has two different sections, it has a section for grownups and a section for kids. And the kids section is full of all of our tools. So these are very tangible one to five minute videos, most of them are animated that go through teaching kids these different techniques"

Related Links:

Wondergrade.com

@wondergrade

Wondergrade on Facebook

Show Credits:

Host: Jodi Fried
Guest: Kristi Coppa
Editor: Matt Feiler