Learn to deliver the MAGPIES program for children's mental health!
Some approaches to emotion regulation at childhood can unintentionally promote experiential avoidance where children learn to ignore their feelings, that their feelings aren’t valid, and/or that their feelings don’t matter.
Yet, our bodies give us essential information about the things we want and care about. Being able to attend to that information and use it to guide our behavior effectively is important; moving from following our emotions blindly toward listening to our emotions wisely. Teaching children to pause and consider what their body is trying to tell them when big, all-encompassing emotions show up can broaden pathways to effective responding, shifting a child’s focus towards the things they could do to meet their needs, whilst also being aware of what certain environments might be simultaneously expecting of them.
This workshop is the second in a five part series, and introduces attendees to MAGPIES for emotion regulation, a developmentally appropriate, neuroaffirmative, contextual behavioral approach to following emotions wisely.
Through didactic presentations, attendees will conceptualize emotion regulation from a MAGPIES perspective (emphasizing the importance of meeting children’s needs).
Through experiential exercises, attendees will be invited to practice exercises relevant to emotion regulation, further planning for challenges that may arise in the context of group-based interventions targeting emotion regulation.
Finally, attendees will receive a suite of easy-to-implement MAGPIES protocols that teachers/clinicians/other professionals can use to explore emotion regulation in naturalistic group-based settings. While it is assumed that many of the children who need this type of support are part of clinical populations of children experiencing mental health distress, it is important to note that many children without any clinical diagnoses will also benefit from learning these skills.