EFT for Kids – How to Do it Right
Written by Renu Sharma
You’ve been using EFT successfully, and it’s helped you in some many ways, but have you ever considered that your child could need it too? Kids can feel stressed, anxious, moody, or angry, just like adults. Pressures related to their schoolwork or their social lives could trigger plenty of negative emotions. And if you’re looking for a safe and effective technique to calm your kid down, EFT or Tapping is your answer.
How EFT helps kids
Many adults overlook the emotional needs of children. But as a parent, you need to understand that your kids can get overwhelmed with negative emotions and face difficulties just like you. With the calming and de-stressing benefits of EFT, kids should be able to tackle the following problems better:
- Anxiety resulting from changes – starting a new school, moving to a new city, etc.
- Sleeping issues
- Stress related to examinations and homework
- Fear of bullies and stress resulting from bullying
- Losing friends
- Separation anxiety
- Sibling rivalry
These are only a few issues that can affect kids and can be tackled using EFT. There may be many other specific changes, not mentioned here, that could result in your child’s emotional suffering. So instead of opting for strong medications, strict disciplinary actions, etc., you could introduce your kid to EFT. Since there are no side effects to this technique, it can be an excellent solution for boosting your child’s emotional health.
Tips for successfully tapping with kids
You’re no stranger to EFT, so you already have a fair idea how to use it, and we’re not going to talk about tapping techniques here. But teaching kids to tap can often more complicated than working with adults. While kids may be able to learn much faster than adults, they might be unable to benefit from tapping if you’re not doing it right. You’ll need to consider their emotional needs and mentalities in order to get the lesson through to them. Here’s what you need to know:
Don’t be pretentious – Kids are smart. Some of them can even detect lies faster than most adults, so the best thing you can do to get through to them is to be authentic. You may feel the need to speak “their language” or “act cool” so they can relate to you and listen to you, but the truth is that this can easily come off as pretentious and might have the opposite effect.
This is especially true in the case of older kids and teenagers. Instead of trying to talk like them and act like them, be yourself so they can learn to do the same from you. That doesn’t mean you should over-complicate your vocabulary with jargon and big words they don’t understand, however. Use simple words and be straightforward in your communications with them.
Don’t underestimate their intelligence – Many adults consider kids to be “not as smart” as an adult, but the truth is that most kids have a bunch of complex thoughts, and they can understand complicated situations much better than you think. Their thinking is simply masked by innocence and lack of vocabulary, which may lead many people to underestimate a kid’s intelligence.
So when you’re teaching them to express their emotions and thoughts, give them the space they need to really communicate. Instead of ordering them around and telling them what to do, gently guide them to talk about how they feel. Avoid asking close-ended questions like, “Do you feel angry?” because this doesn’t really give them room for expression.
Help them describe their emotions – Tapping may be the solution to emotional distress, but without acknowledging and understanding what kind of emotions they’re dealing with, people will be unable to use this technique efficiently. So you will be teaching kids to express their emotions, which they will then learn to handle.
As mentioned in the previous point, lack of vocabulary often holds children back from expressing their feelings. The best way to help them learn is by asking them to describe how it feels in their body. For example, they may experience disappointment from failing an exam. Tell them to describe how their body feels in such situations. They may feel as if someone is stomping on their chest, or twisting their stomach.
Final thoughts
These are some of the basics you need to remember about helping kids using EFT. You now have a clear idea of what kind of approach you should take and how you can teach children more effectively. It’s important to also remember that your goal isn’t to get them to like you. You need to focus on loving and helping them, so that even when they have to do something they don’t enjoy, you are there to support and encourage them.
