Parent Resource Guide: Healing
Articles
"Being friends doesn’t mean that you’ll never fight
It’s common for friends to fight or have trouble getting along
Sometimes fights are easy to move on from and they can make your friendship stronger and closer.
Sometimes small fights can turn into large ones and you may have to work hard to sort things out."
Teaching Kids About Forgiveness
-
A variety of techniques and activities to use when your child is feeling hurt and frustrated, which can lead to forgiveness.
Example:
Recognize and support – Acknowledge instances that leave your child feeling angry. Don’t discredit your child’s feelings, kid’s need validation just like adults. Sometimes just the fact that you showed support and allowed your child to own their feelings can be enough to put the youngster at ease.
Meditations/ Rooted Practices
Forgiveness Meditation:
Give children a moment each time you ask them to picture someone new.
Read aloud the words you want children to say silently to themselves one phrase at a time, with pauses in between.
Picture yourself in your mind. As you breathe in and out, repeat these words silently to yourself:
I forgive myself for whatever I did, on purpose or by accident.
May I be happy, free of confusion, understand myself and the world.
May I help others to be happy, free of confusion, and full of understanding.
Now picture in your mind a person you love and want to forgive.
As you breathe in and out, repeat these words silently to yourself:
From my heart, I forgive you for whatever you did, on purpose or by accident.
May you be happy, free of confusion, and understand yourself and the world.
Please forgive me for whatever I did to you, on purpose or by accident.
May we open our hearts and minds to meet in love and understanding.
Try to feel the warmth of the healing between you.
Now picture in your mind someone you have hurt.
As you breathe in and out, repeat these words silently to yourself:
Please forgive me for whatever I did to you, on purpose or by accident.
May you be happy, free of confusion, and understand yourself and the world.
Please forgive me for whatever I did to you, on purpose or by accident.
May we open our hearts and minds to meet in love and understanding.
Try to feel the warmth of the healing between you.
Now picture in your mind a person you do not like very much.
As you breathe in and out, repeat these words silently to yourself:
Please forgive me for whatever I did to you, on purpose or by accident.
May you be happy, free of confusion, and understand yourself and the world.
Please forgive me for whatever I did to you, on purpose or by accident.
May we open our hearts and minds to meet in love and understanding.
Try to feel the warmth of the healing between you.
Knot Demonstration Activity
Here’s a knot. We make knots out of rope. Knots also are a way of describing the tangled fights between people and the ways each of us feels after we get in a fight. Some folks say, “It feels like there is a knot in my stomach.”
Just like it’s hard to untangle a knot, it’s also hard to fix a friendship when we hurt someone. Untying a knot helps us remember some important things about how to fix a mistake we’ve made or a mess that has arisen between us and others.
Tease out lessons about the work of healing hurt being like a knot. For instance:
● Admit that there’s a knot.
● Ignoring the knot only makes the knot tighter and harder to untangle.
● It takes effort to untie a knot. We can’t give up after only one try.
● Sometimes we have to ask others for help and advice about how to untie complicated knots.
● Be ready for more knots to develop as you’re trying to untangle the first one.
● Tying and untying knots require practice and skill.
Faith In Action: I Forgive Exercise
This exercise speaks to the many tenets of forgiveness, and there are leading questions provided in the link below. You will ask your child to privately write down something they did to hurt someone else or themselves and then they will think of ways to make this right.
Music/Videos/Stories
Visit the Kids Page: