Encouraging Self-Management through Parent and Child Brain Breaks at Home

By Demetra Mylonas and Gina Cherkowski, PhD.

The school day is over, but the real challenge is just beginning.  Before heading home to tackle homework, prepare dinner, and shuffle between swim practice for one child and dance lessons for the other, there’s one quick errand to run—the grocery store. But everyone is exhausted, hungry, and eager to get home.

The store is crowded, the checkout lines are long, and the tension is rising.  The kids are bickering, and just as things feel overwhelming, your phone rings. It’s an important call you’ve been waiting for all day—one you can’t ignore, even though it’s the last thing you want to deal with right now.

As the kids get louder and more restless, you snap, whisper-shouting for them to “calm down” and “stay still.”  Instead of settling, they become even more agitated.  Meanwhile, you’re unloading groceries, thinking of the events that are on the schedule this evening, juggling phone calls, all the while trying to keep your frustration in check. But with every passing minute, the situation feels more unmanageable.

Sound familiar? 

Planning and Three Deep Breaths

These moments are normal. We all have them.  With a little preparation and a shift in approach, moments of struggle can become more manageable.  When we do sense that we are becoming overwhelmed, we need to remember to take three deep breaths. 

Most parents intuitively know how to model calmness and slowing down in times of intense emotionally-driven behaviors in their children and further know to encourage their child to regain their calm, so that the situation can be dealt with.  This technique may not always work for various practical reasons such as, the situation may not allow for it, as per the vignette. But it can also work wonders. Yet, children need to be explicitly taught in order for the strategy to work.  Many children do not intrinsically know what it means to calm down and how to calm down, and sometimes, well-meaning parents inadvertently make the situation worse. In a heated moment, they may demand, “calm down!” but have not rehearsed what they looks and feels like with the child. To add further complexity, children with neurodiverse learning needs may require additional support and practice to learn to regulate their nervous systems.  

Self-management, or self-regulation is about having the ability to manage one’s emotions and respond to what our bodies need.¹  In situations where a child is feeling hijacked by an intense emotional state, unless they have been explicitly taught a set of skills to help them get back to a functional arousal state, their logical thinking abilities cannot be accessed.  This management function is promoted by and learned effectively through the purposeful and explicit practice of brain breaks.  More and more, these strategies are taught and practiced in schools, which allow students to energize their minds and free regions in their brains that aren’t functioning correctly due to stress and cognitively challenging work.²  The positive outcome of learning and practicing these brain breaks with your own children is extraordinary.  Parents and teachers have found that these learnings are beneficial for all children, regardless of specific learning or behavioural needs. 

What exactly is a brain break?

Brain breaks are quick, structured breaks using physical movement, mindfulness exercises and sensory activities to help our brains stay focused and attentive, by helping to carry blood and oxygen to the brain.  These breaks allow different regions of the brain that are blocked by stress or high intensity work or situations to revitalize by switching activity to different brain networks.³ Brain breaks need to be taught, learned and practiced before fatigue, boredom, inattention or stress sets in. Learning how to calm when your body feels excitement or stress is a skill that requires explicit teaching and practice, so that when one needs it, the brain knows what to do.  Simple, at home, family-focused strategies help teach our little ones how to manage their emotions.

How can brain breaks be used at home?

Breathing Practice: There are many types of breathing and calming techniques that can be introduced and practiced at home.  Teaching these at home as part of the day’s routine, allows the learning to take place in a repetitive, non-threatening manner, and then can become part of the child’s repertoire they can access when situations call for them.  Learning to take a pause, learning to take a few, long, cleansing breaths and the reasons why this helps, can be easily and effectively worked into your home routine.  Take for example the often-chaotic morning rush.  Starting each wake up with a big, deep breath, (and a little cuddle), not only brings fresh oxygen into the brain, but it also helps set the tone of calm. Here are a few breathing techniques to practice together:

• Belly Breathing – while your child is lying down on their back, place a stuffed toy or book on their bellies.  Guiding them to breathe in through their nose, slow and for as long as they can, and then out through their mouth, slowly and as long as they can, ask them to balance their toy or book.  Repeat a second or third time, based on the child’s attention.  This is a great skill to introduce before bedtime, as it promotes relaxation and helps to regulate the nervous system.  
• Heart Beating – encourage your child to place their hand over their heart and find their heartbeat.  This alone immediately focuses attention and is often very helpful ‘in a pinch’ with younger children.  Further practice with heartbeats includes:
  • Have your child do some rigorous activity and then find their heartbeat.  What can they identify has changed from when they were resting?  How are they feeling with this elevated heartbeat?  
  • After some rigorous activity, have the child engage in a relaxation breathing moment.  What is happening now to their heart rate?  How are they feeling now that they have relaxed?
  • As children become more proficient in finding their heartbeats and noticing their feelings, this awareness can extend to times of anxiety or panic, such as before a sports competition, during the morning rush or after some very exciting event.  
  • Continued awareness and practice allows for the child to notice how breathing can affect mood, energy level, focus, and performance.  Then, when you are in a moment that a breathing break could help, rather than asking the child to ‘calm down’, you can direct them to find their heartbeat, and either take a long slow breath to lower their rate, or add activity to increase their rate.  
• Ocean Breathing – Practice making the noise of the sea waves while breathing deeply from your diaphragm. Close your eyes with your child and imagine that your anger is a fiery flame waiting on a sandy shore. And as you breathe life into the ocean waves, they grow closer and closer to the flame to extinguish it.

Sensory Awareness: All children, and especially children with any type of neurodiversity benefit from understanding their sensory needs.  Some children may feel overwhelmed with lights, noise and touch. Whereas other children need extra sensations to help them to feel alert.  Knowing your child’s sensitivity profile is very useful and books such as The Out of Sync Child by Carol Stock Kranowitz helps parents to evaluate what sensory processing profile their child might have and what they can do to help them.⁴  In terms of general strategies to aid with self-regulation, these can be added to your day with your children, as they are fun to do and work extremely well when our bodies need them.

• Sensory “in-the-moment”: Also known as the ‘5-4-3-2-1 technique’, this activity grounds us in the present moment, helps to calm the nervous system and encourages tranquility.  To introduce, either while going for a stroll outdoors, or while sitting in your yard or even your car, guide your child to find 5 things they can hear, 4 things they can touch, 3 things they can smell, 2 things they can see and one thing they can taste.  The senses can be switched around, depending on the situation, making this a very versatile activity.  Doing this activity helps to guide the brain to focus on our surroundings and take simple pleasure in what is around us.  The benefits of this are great, but especially helpful when a child can use this strategy during times of dysregulation, stress, pain, fear or worry.  Additionally, this technique can be part of the routine, taking place before things that are typically tough on your child, such as perhaps a test at school, a visit to the doctor or a social encounter.  
• Mental snapshots: This activity is essentially taking a picture of your surroundings and holding it in your memory.  This practice helps not only to sharpen your awareness skills, but it also helps to develop your memory skills and allows you to build a portfolio of memories you can access when you need to.  For children, this ‘brain photo album’ is a game changer for building up their self-regulation portfolio.  It’s a take on the memory game many played as children, where a few items are presented on a tray and after a few seconds of looking at it, the children close their eyes, and after one or two items are taken away, the children guess the missing items.  In this rendition, guide your child to look around their setting – I love to go outside to teach this!  Then, they are asked to close their eyes and bring up a picture of what they just saw.  What can they remember?  Then they are asked to open their eyes and look around again at the same spot to notice more details.  Again, once they close their eyes and recall the scene, they can identify even more of what they saw.  As you and your child practice this technique, you will notice how much more clarity and awareness capabilities you have, and how it can serve to redirect the brain in times of stress or chaos.  

Think back to the opening scenario, but this time, as your phone rings, you calmly ask your children to focus on an “in-the-moment” activity until you’re off the call, assuring them you’ll discuss it in the car. If they’ve practiced this before, they’ll likely jump into action without hesitation, easing the chaos and creating a smoother transition for the rest of the day. Don’t forget to take three deep breaths yourself—this small act can help reset your own mindset. Together, these simple strategies foster a supportive environment, promote self-regulation, and contribute to healthy emotional development. Rooted in neuroscience, they respect each child’s individuality while equipping both you and your children with lifelong coping skills.

References:

1. Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning. (2022). Fundamentals of SEL. Retrieved from https://casel.org/fundamentals-of-sel.
2. Schonert-Reichl, K. A., & Roeser, R. W. (Eds.). (2016). Handbook of mindfulness in education: Integrating theory and research into practice. Springer.
3. Willis, J. (2016). Using brain breaks to restore students’ focus. Retrieved from https://www.edutopia.org/article/brain-breaks-restore-student-focus-judy-willis/ 
4. Kranowitz, C. S., & Miller, L. J. (2022). The out-of-sync child: recognizing and coping with sensory processing differences. Third edition. Teacher Perigee, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC.