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Finding your brave – Children’s Mental Health Week

Day 5: What does ‘finding your brave’ mean for a child with autism?

What does ‘finding your brave’ mean for YOUR child? We hope you’ve found some useful advice in our series this week to help you answer that question and support your child and their mental health.

Here’s a summary with links to each of the blogs in this series :

  1. Explain to your child what bravery means and how it relates to their life and their personal challenges – What is bravery?
  2. Turn detective and get a deeper understanding of your child’s fears, worries and anxieties and the thoughts that are holding them back – What are you scared of?
  3. Choose some support tools and create strategies to help reduce uncertainties, learn social skills and aid communication – Overcoming fears – getting closer to brave
  4. Acknowledge and celebrate your child’s bravery in all its forms to boost their self-esteem, confidence and mental health – How does being brave make us feel?

Would you like a bit of help to get started?

sign up for bravery boosters button

Click the button above to sign up now and we’ll email you our bravery boosters bundle!

You’ll receive a guide to developing good emotional intelligence that you can download and print, a video guide to using a feelings diary and a discount code to use when you purchase any Feelings and Emotional support products. A selection of these products have been featured in our ‘finding your brave’ series. 

  • Back-to-School Self-Talk Prompt Sheet

  • cover image feelings notebook extra stickers

    Extra sticker sheets for Feelings Notebook

  • Feelings Tag-O-Meter

  • I Can Do It Manage My Feelings Kit

  • I Can Do It Share How I Feel Mini Kit

  • cover image product feelings notebook

    My TomTag Feelings Notebook

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How does being brave make us feel?

boy stood on stacked logs with text how does brave make you feel

Finding your brave – Children’s Mental Health Week

Day 4: What does ‘finding your brave’ mean for a child with autism?

It’s time to celebrate!

As we’ve talked about earlier, many children with autism show their bravery in the everyday acts of dealing with life. Recognising and celebrating this bravery is just as important, if not more so, as acknowledging it for the ‘big’ brave events.

Showing your child how to see and celebrate their bravery in the seemingly smaller things boosts their self-esteem, confidence and mental health. Congratulating your child on each brave step (big or small) helps them feel good about themselves and they can learn to find courage to do bigger things.

If you’ve missed any of the series so far, you can recap here: 

How does being brave make us feel?

Bravery often doesn’t feel like bravery. It can feel like butterflies in your tummy, sweaty hands, racing thoughts or maybe a moment of intense focus and concentration. It’s only after being brave that we feel proud, happy and confident – that elusive ‘I feel good’ feeling! When we are brave we can have fun, meet new people, share a new experience and boost our mental health and well-being.

Bravery can mean so many things: big and small. As a parent of a child with autism, it’s often hard not to compare them with their typically developing peers and their acts of bravery. Others may have learnt to ride a bike, play a musical instrument or been picked for the school football team whilst your child is struggling to put on their shoes, hold a pencil or sleep through the night. 

Everyday heroes

Getting dressed, going to school or keeping calm when there is a change to routine are all examples of bravery if you have anxiety, sensory difficulties or struggle with flexible thinking. 

Take time each day to note down an instance when your child has been brave. We use our TomTag Feelings notebook to record these moments but you could also write each moment on a note and pop them into a note jar. Simply pausing and recording these moments highlights the experience of being brave making it more likely to reinforce positive memories. Using a notebook, note jar or similar will help you and your child to revisit and reflect on the ‘brave moment’ entries when similar challenges arise in the future. Together with your child you can build a bravery chain, link by link.

Its also important to reassure your child that not feeling brave is okay and that other children will often feel this way too. This is another time when it can be helpful to use a visual feelings scale (like TomTag’s Share how I feel tag) to help your child show or tell you how they are feeling. Acknowledge their feelings and praise them for ‘finding their brave’ to share them with you. Remind them that it takes time and practice to ‘find your brave’ – be patient if you need to repeat the process we discussed earlier of identifying fears and finding support strategies to overcome them.

Tom’s story

Over the years we’ve always tried to celebrate all Tom’s acts of ‘bravery’. We’ve praised and encouraged him with seemingly small things like saying hello, sitting at the table or making food choices. Bravery has unfolded one situation at a time. 

Over time, he’s overcome his fear of speaking, meeting new people and learning new skills such as skiing, riding a bike and, more recently, even driving! When he faces new challenges, we remind him how he found his brave on all these occasions to reassure him that he does have the strength within to succeed. 

tomas putting letters on a board in front of mum as a child and presenting a display on Switzerland as a young adult

How does your child show their bravery? Share your proud moments with us – we’d love to hear from you and share your joy!

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Overcoming fears – getting closer to brave

COVER IMAGE FOR DAY 3 CHILDREN'S MENTAL HEALTH WEEK BLOG, OVERCOMING FEARS

Finding your brave – Children’s Mental Health Week

Day 3: What does ‘finding your brave’ mean for a child with autism?

We’ve introduced the idea of what bravery means and why being brave can make us feel good and looked at ways to help your child identify and understand their barriers to being brave (what are you scared of?). 

Now it’s time for some action! Let’s look at some ways you can support your child to help them overcome some of their fears and get closer to finding their brave.

Overcoming fears – getting closer to brave

Feeling worried about the unknown or new situations is common and familiar to almost all of us.

For many children with autism, normal daily life can feel like the great unknown every day. If you’re worried about what’s going to happen, struggle with anxiety around people and social situations or can’t communicate what you want or need, every single day can feel scary and overwhelming. It’s very hard to ‘find your brave’ when you’re in a constant state of anxiety. Being scared and anxious is exhausting and can often lead us into more complex mental health problems.

There are strategies we can use to deal with these uncertainties and ways to learn skills that can help combat anxieties. It’s time to meet the superheroes – visual supports!! 

Finding your brave – reducing uncertainty with visual supports

An intolerance of uncertainty is a common cause of anxiety for many children with autism, causing them to ‘act out’ or display other unwanted behaviours when their routines change or they are in unfamiliar situations. 

A visual schedule or timetable takes away the element of surprise and makes it clear what your child can expect to happen. Their anxiety level will come down and it will be easier for them to transition between activities, finding their brave to move on.  

a diary pageIn this diary entry, Tom felt worried because he didn’t know whether his Speech and Language therapist was visiting him at school that day. By reminding him to check the timetable in his planner, Tom was able to reassure himself about when to expect to see his therapist.

tomtag overlaid on an image of a child in the dentist's chair receiving treatmentHelping your child to ‘find their brave’ for unfamiliar or ‘scary’ situations – things like visiting the dentist, doctor or hairdresser – is eased by good planning and preparation. Using a visual tool like TomTag or a simple social story can help you to communicate and explain to your child what’s going happen before the event, reducing the uncertainty and consequent anxieties.

Finding your brave – learning social skills with visual supports

Social cues can be difficult for many children with autism to understand as they interact with others. They get anxious about what is expected of them socially and can find if hard to interpret other people’s behaviour.

Visual prompts can be useful in teaching social rules such as sharing, taking turns and waiting. With practice and patience, children can learn to use these supports on their own in social situations, providing them with a permanent reminder of expectations and setting the stage for them to find their brave!

In the earlier example, Tom was worried about his speech therapist being late. Using drawings, we reminded him about the concept of waiting. Knowing what was expected of him in this situation and giving him some self-help strategies (OT exercises) helped to calm him down.

drawings to help Tom find self-help strategies for waiting for therapisr

Finding your brave – communicating needs with visual supports

Sensory overload, changes to routine, difficulties processing information, being tired or hungry are all common triggers for anger and challenging behaviour. In these situations, it is almost impossible for a child to be brave.

Tom remembers what he sees rather than what he hears as he can’t process too many words at once. Ask him questions or give him instructions and his stress just increases – the more we talk, the less he hears! Offering children like Tom a non-verbal means of communication to use allows them to understand and express their feelings without the stress of having to process language at the same time.

tomtag samples from the feelings and emotions range

The TomTag Share how I feel visual feelings scale is one of our best sellers – and you can see why! It’s such a simple device but a very quick, effective and efficient way for your child to show or tell you how they are feeling. Once they’re learnt to identify and understand what each feeling means, you can use more detailed visual guides to build self-help strategies they can use to cope with different feelings and emotions, giving them the reassurance and confidence they need to find their brave.

Next: How does being brave make us feel?

The benefits and joys of finding your brave 

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Finding your brave – what are you scared of?

background of mountains, 2 children sitting with thought bubbles to show what they are afraid of

Finding your brave – Children’s Mental Health Week

Day 2: What does ‘finding your brave’ mean for a child with autism?

Now that you’ve introduced the idea of what bravery means and why being brave can make us feel good (follow the link if you missed it), we look at helping your child understand what can hold us back and the feelings that can stop us being brave. 

What are you scared of?

background of mountains, 2 children sitting with thought bubbles to show what they are afraid ofWhat stops us being brave and why can being brave be so difficult? 

Being brave generally means facing something difficult or a situation we’re unsure, worried or scared about and going ahead anyway.

To help your child with autism ‘find their brave’, you need to understand what those fears, worries or anxieties are that are their barriers to being brave. It’s the thoughts and feelings we create ourselves that are most often what get in the way of doing something or trying something new. These unhelpful thoughts might include worries about getting something wrong, being embarrassed or people laughing at you.

Firstly, let your child know that it’s normal to have these emotions but that there things we can do to help ourselves to stop these thoughts and feelings getting in the way of what we want or need to do and affecting our mental health. To find out what their barriers are you may just be able to ask them. If your child is non-verbal or finds it tricky to talk about their feelings – perhaps because they have limited language skills – you will need to try some other tactics. 

TomTag feelings notebook with example page filled inFor Tom, who has autism, just talking about his fears can be a cause of stress too. We’ve used the TomTag Feelings Notebook to help him communicate with us and share his concerns in a less direct or confrontational way.

In this example, he describes feeling nervous about meeting his teacher as he was unsure about what to say to her. He goes on to share that he always feels nervous when he sees other people. An example of how unhelpful thoughts – like saying something wrong or that people might laugh at him – are the barriers to bravery here.

 You can use also use a diary format like this to help you and your child keep a record of feelings, anxieties, worries or behaviour which will help you to track any patterns and identify underlying triggers. Turn detective, be curious and think about what might be beneath their behaviour to see what the real issues are.

Right feeling, wrong size?

Sometimes, your child won’t even be sure what they’re afraid of, which can in itself make them feel more anxious and afraid. It’s also possible that they may have difficulty understanding the size or intensity of their feelings, something Tomas finds quite difficult.

When he was younger, Tom was terrified of flies. This was particularly difficult in the summer months as he would scream and become extremely anxious about going to sleep. Every evening we would have to make sure that his bedroom was free of the unwelcome guests before he would even go into his room.

With support, Tom was able to use drawings as a visual tool to help him share what it was about flies that frightened him and how they made him feel. He thought that the fly would eat him and he felt panic! Once we knew what the fears were, we could reassure him that it was normal to have feelings about flies. We were able to show him that his feeling of panic was unhelpful as it made things feel more scary than they really were. A case of the right feeling but the wrong size.

drawing by Tomas to explain his fear of flies

Doing the detective work was crucial. Had we not known about the fear then Tom’s reluctance to go to bed might have been misinterpreted as challenging behaviour around bedtime routines. By understanding his fears, providing him with reassurance and making him feel safe, we could encourage him to be brave with the help of positive thinking and a bright new fly swatter which we showed him how to use! 

Next: Overcoming fears – getting closer to brave

Looking at some ways you can support your child to help them overcome some of their fears and get closer to finding their brave.

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What does ‘Finding your brave’ mean for a child with autism?

girl on high ropes stepping onto a plank

children's mental health week logoChildren’s Mental Health Week is run by the charity Place2Be, to focus on the importance of looking after our emotional well-being from an early age.

Running from 3 – 9 February 2020, the theme this year is ‘Find your brave’.

Whilst autism itself it NOT a mental health condition, we do know that people with autism or a learning disability (or both) are more likely to experience mental health problems than the general population – and more likely to have it overlooked or ignored.

Helping your autistic child to ‘find their brave’ may take a little longer, need a bit more effort, patience and persuasion but with determination progress will be made and it can only have a positive affect on their mental health.

 

What does ‘finding your brave’ mean for a child with autism?

Bravery is different for every child and comes in all shapes and sizes. It’s not all about grand gestures, slaying dragons, high ropes or superheroes! 

Being brave generally means facing something difficult or a situation you’re unsure, worried or scared about and going ahead anyway. If, like my son, your child has sensory processing issues, communication difficulties or an intolerance of uncertainty then simply managing and coping with daily life will mean calling upon their bravery resources pretty much every day.

Imagine all the things your child might be unsure or worried about. Is it going to school, visiting the hairdresser, sharing worries or asking for help?

It may also be something that appears small to us, such as trying a different food, taking a new route home from school or saying hello to grandma.

Over the next few days, we’ll share some ideas and techniques for supporting your child to find their brave. We’ll look at what it means to be brave, what holds us back and how to deal with those feelings that stop us. Finally we’ll talk about why it’s good to be brave and share some ideas for ways that TomTag can be used to help.

Let’s get started!

What is bravery?

Start by explaining to your child what bravery means and why being brave can make us feel good about ourselves.

Sometimes we need to be brave for big challenges but most of the time being brave means finding positive ways to deal with everyday difficulties and situations. It doesn’t mean that they have to deal with everything on their own. Let them know that it’s brave to ask for and accept help.    

Bravery means something different for everyone. Remind your child that what’s brave for them might not feel brave for someone else.

Use examples from your own life to show times when you’ve had to be brave. It can help children to see that as adults we also have to face our fears in everyday life. 

Next: What are you scared of?

What stops us being brave and why can being brave be so difficult? Helping your child understand what can hold us back and the feelings that can stop us being brave.