Wondergrade: Learning Emotions

I’ve been lucky that my son has been late to the high feelings but they have arrived and come as a shock to us- as much as we tried to prepare ourselves for this period. I had dabbled with this app a couple times but finally had a true meltdown moment where I could put it to the rest and it DID NOT FAIL. This is such a useful tool and there’s so much helpful information for us as parents that’s concise, tangible and non pretentious. I really appreciate that it acknowledges parenting is hard and we are all just doing our best.

We’ve been using this app in the carpool line before school and at bedtime for a couple weeks now and there’s been a marked improvement with my five year old. This morning when he was upset he asked for the app and was able to navigate to the tools for what he was feeling (mad), expressed to me that he wasn’t ready to talk about it, and did a few of the “mad” exercises to calm down. Once he had calmed down he told me why he was upset (he wanted to walk the dog but we didn’t have time before school) and we talked about it. The only “critique” comes from my son directly. He wishes the app had more feelings like “hungry” and “tired” because he struggles with expressing those and doesn’t think they fit under the existing tools (“mama I’m not mad, I’m hungry but it looks like mad”).

This app has done so much to teach my toddler how to breathe. He loves the little calming games. They are really great if we are out and about and I need a few minutes of distraction that won’t get him wound up. The new parent portion of the app is great. We just love it, he’s been asking for “blue guy” since he was about 18 months old and does the little exercises out of habit when he’s having a hard time calming himself. Can’t say enough good about it.