What is emotional health?
Some people think that being emotionally healthy simply means feeling positive. But: • it just isn’t possible to feel good all the time, because feelings such as anxiety, sadness and anger are all very natural and healthy responses to often unavoidable life-events • if you try to force yourself to feel good, the negative feelings tend to go “underground” and then re-surface when you least expect them to • if you believe you should be feeling happy all the time, then when those “negative” feelings do re-surface, you may start to feel bad about feeling bad, feel worse about that, and spiral down into a cycle of self-blame and depression. Emotional health, then, is not about feeling good all the time. Rather, it’s about respecting your emotions – all of them – and accepting that they’re all part of a healthy and colourful existence. Many men find this difficult, largely because they’ve been brought up to believe that they should control their feelings – particularly feelings like sadness,
Emotional health is… • part of our overall health concerned with the way we think and feel. • it refers to our sense of well-being, our ability to cope with life events. • and our ability to acknowledge and respect emotions, our own and those of others. People do not automatically have either good or poor emotional health; you’re not given a particular level of emotional health at birth. Your emotional health depends on the circumstances you grow up in, the knowledge and skills and experience collected throughout life, and how these are used. You can think of emotional heath as being a sort of sliding scale. At one end of the scale you have a sense of distress and despair, at the other a feeling of security and being able to cope. And people will go up and down this scale – that’s part of life and an important part of being emotionally healthy.
As babies grow and develop, they have feelings. Parents, caregivers, and transitional objects help children learn about their feelings and how to manage them. They provide the kind of support and encouragement your child needs to explore the world and feel competent and successful. When a child can interact with others, communicate needs and express emotions in safe ways, that child has good emotional health. Why Do Infants Use soft Objects? • They help infants to make the emotional transition from dependence to independence. • They give the child emotional and tangible comfort. • They have a calming effect on the child. • They can help an infant learn self control. (American Academy of Pediatrics, 2001) (Braxelton, 1992) Taggies Concept and Mission: Focused on the “whole child” and a child’s emotional health, Taggies enhances early childhood emotional well being, growth, and sense of security by providing patented tactile and visually stimulating features that both soothe and entertai
