The 5 Powerful Benefits of Journaling For Kids
Are you looking for a positive way to channel your child’s creativity and feelings of concern during the current pandemic of the coronavirus? Introduce them to journaling. Journaling is no longer an exclusive club for adults. Parents of children as young as 4 years old are seeing the benefits from daily journaling. So, what is journaling exactly? Simply put, journaling is a way to express feelings, thoughts, or concerns on paper. Keeping a journal can organize goals and help with perspective for future endeavors. For a child, there are similar, age-appropriate benefits. Your children will benefit from journaling by learning to love open-ended writing and reflective perspective on current events involving them.
Below are 5 powerful benefits of journaling for kids.
1. Helps improve writing and spelling skills
Research by Dr. Karin Harman James, a professor of psychology and brain sciences at Indiana University, indicates children with regular handwriting rituals has revealed writing positively contributes to improved recognition of letters and reading confidence. Having the increased recognition of letters from memory leads to improved spelling and grammar habits among even young children. After the mastery of word recognition, closely followed is the increased interpretation of the meanings.
2. Encourages open communication with peers and family
Children are more likely to enjoy writing when the topic interests them. A study by The Department for Education (UK) explains that students feel encouraged and confident to share their writings with teachers and peers if the topic was of their choosing. The topic spectrum, of journaling is vast, because the topic is always what is of interest of the child. Journaling gives them the opportunity to write and discuss exactly what is on their mind without the limitation of judgement.
3. Facilitates healthy techniques of releasing emotions
Dr. James Pennebaker is the author of the well-known book, Writing to Heal, where he writes about how the act of writing can heal traumas and loss. The author shares how,
“Emotional upheavals touch every part of our lives…Writing helps us focus and organize the experience.”
Our children are exposed to more trauma than previously seen in recent years. The coronavirus has manifested new sources of anxiety for our children. They are inundated with knowledge from school, peers, media, and us. This amount of information can have a crippling effect on them. Using this opportunity to journal their feelings and visually address their concerns and fears will help them to understand the experience, and heal from the recent traumatic experiences.
4. Organizes goals and strategies
Having a well-defined vision for a goal is crucial to the achievement stage. Journaling can help to define a goal by helping the writer to envision the goal. It can also be helpful to be able to edit goals as time progresses. Writing goals, as part of journaling, can also help identify potential obstacles. Encourage your children to recognize the benefits of visually seeing goals and more specifically sharing them in their journals.
5. Increases gratitude
Dr. Korb wrote in an article in Psychology Today addressing the direct connection of feelings of gratitude to dopamine. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that is a pathway to reward-motivated behavior, which means you are more inclined to repeat behaviors that have trigged the response. Gratitude has a powerful effect on your children’s lives due to the cycle. If your children are encouraged to journal daily and use that journal to express gratitude, their brains will focus on more positive stimuli. In other words, once your brain is trained to focus on aspects of life to be grateful for, it will begin to search for other aspects of life that trigger gratitude.
To help you start their journey of journaling, I have designed an e-journal for kids. The download is available here. The journal is designed to encourage open writing ended writing and daily gratitude. The daily impact of the coronavirus pandemic can overshadow what matters most to you and your family. Help them isolate and expand what they are grateful for and what they are looking forward to doing in the near and distant future. I hope this e-journal sparks creativity and positivity within your child and within yourself. Enjoy!
