Children's Mental Health Songs

Children's mental health songs are essentially practical tools that rely on the rules of children's language development and transform abstract psychological adjustment logic into short rhythmic and scene-based sentences. Its core function is to help children complete emotion recognition, behavioral guidance and basic psychological literacy construction in a zero-preaching manner. It is by no means a random rhyming jingle. It is a low-cost early psychological intervention method that has been verified by multiple schools of child psychology.

When I was piloting psychological intervention in the first grade of a primary school in Haidian last year, I met a little boy when he first entered the class. Whenever he had a conflict with a classmate, he would bite the back of his hand. When I asked him what was wrong, he would only frown and say "I feel bad." I couldn't tell whether he was aggrieved or angry. Later, we compiled the basic content of emotion recognition into four short songs, with small movements of patting the shoulder and touching the chest. We taught it to the whole class for only a week. When the little boy raised his hand to bite the back of his hand, he suddenly paused for two seconds, touched his chest and said to me, "Teacher, I am now" My heart is pounding, my face is hot, I have anger in my chest.'" - You see, with such a rhymed vernacular, he accurately expressed his anger for the first time. This is the most practical use of songs, which is much more effective than squatting down and talking for half an hour about "saying what you have emotions to say".

In fact, there is no unified standard for the creative logic of such songs in the industry. Researchers who prefer developmental psychology believe that the core should be on "emotion naming", which means to mix words that children cannot express accurately, such as "anger, grievance, anxiety, jealousy", into short sentences that are easy to remember, to help them improve the granularity of their emotions, so as to avoid only using instinctive reactions such as "crying, making trouble, and hitting" to vent their emotions.； Practitioners who prefer behaviorism feel that it is useless to just have a name. They must add specific actionable actions, such as "Clench three times and take a deep breath." You can do it directly after singing. Repeat it a few times to form a conditioned reflex and get faster results. ； There are also humanistic counselors who are most opposed to making the songs too rigid, saying that it is best to leave half of the blanks for the children to fill in. I once met a child who was obsessed with dinosaurs. He changed the "Bad mood, drive them all away" we compiled into "Tyrannosaurus rex, howl, bad mood, eat them all." When he was in a mood, he hummed a few lines, and the effect was ten times better than the original version.

Of course, there are many people who think this thing is useless. I met a fourth-grade primary school teacher a while ago who complained that she had tried to teach similar songs to her students, but the students thought it was too childish and no one was willing to sing it. In turn, they teased her, "Teacher, are you teaching kindergarten children?" This is indeed true. The applicable age of ballads is basically stuck at 3-10 years old. After children develop abstract thinking, this kind of infantile rhythmic content will naturally no longer apply. Forcing them will cause rebellion. This is why we have always said not to use ballads as a "panacea."

I have compiled seven or eight versions of ballads with different scenes, and I have gone through many pitfalls. At first, in order to make up for a rhyme, I changed "stop and take a moment" to "stop and turn around." As a result, some children actually turned around in circles when they were angry. They fainted and fell to the ground, which made their mood even worse. Later, I realized that rhyme is to lower the threshold of memory, and the accuracy of the content cannot be sacrificed for rhyme. It is best to compile it based on the real scenes of children's daily life. For example, for children who are afraid of raising their hands to speak when they first enter elementary school, we can compile "Hands half raised, we are not afraid, and no one will laugh when we make mistakes." It is much more effective than the empty slogan "You have to be brave."

To put it bluntly, this thing is a stepping stone to help children open up their hearts. There is no standard answer at all, and there is no need to pursue any professional wording. As long as the children are willing to sing and express their emotions through this, it is enough. Last time, a mother told me that whenever her child loses his temper, he will cry and hum his own made-up "I am a little fairy, I don't get angry", humming to himself before bursting into laughter. This is not as effective as a picture book that talks about ten great principles.