Thought Challenging: Boosting Children’s Mental Health

Have you noticed a child who is thinking about the worst possible things happening? That’s what humans do! It is important we notice these thoughts because they have a big role in a child’s mental health.

When we’re trying to change difficult emotions, it might be easy to name the problems and triggers that caused those emotions. Sometimes, children don’t notice the other factors that impact our emotions, like thoughts and beliefs. For example, on a rainy day, one child might be disappointed that their plans to go swimming got cancelled but another child might be excited to splash in puddles. Neither of these reactions is wrong, but the thoughts we have about our surroundings can control how we feel.

We can help kids change their emotions by showing them ways to change these thoughts, especially repeated negative thoughts.

What is Thought Challenging?

Thought challenging is a tool that’s often used in therapy to check and change the negative thoughts that cloud our vision. For kids struggling with anxiety and depression, overly negative thinking can become a habit that’s hard to break or even recognize. Thought challenging helps us recognize that our first reaction is not always based on facts, and we have the power to decide what to think when we encounter new challenges in life. Life will still give us hard times but thought challenging gives kids power over their responses to stressful situations.

Who Can Benefit From Thought Challenging?

Thought Challenging can be useful for anyone. As a tool, it can help develop healthy mental habits and careful review of thoughts that might be overly self-critical, helpless or panicked. These habits can make children more resilient when they encounter new challenges and work as a preventive tool to maintain mental wellness.

4 Steps for Challenging Negative Thoughts

Effective thought challenging involves working together to find thoughts that are more true or more helpful than the overly negative thoughts that often come faster to our brains. Thought challenging is different from criticizing your child’s negative thoughts by telling them they’re wrong or being over-dramatic; this is coming alongside your child to help build the skills to stay curious about their thoughts and find more helpful thoughts on their own.

1. Name the specific emotions this thought is causing.

When we know we’re feeling “frustrated” or “disappointed” instead of just “bad,” we can think more clearly about what activities might help us feel better. Naming and soothing these emotions in the moment can make our thoughts more flexible to challenging. It’s hard to think logically if you’re still overwhelmed!

2. Find the thought that’s causing problems.

This can be harder than it sounds! A thought is usually a verbal statement of why a situation is causing certain emotions.

For example, if I know that the situation, “My friend is moving to a new school,” is causing me to feel sad and scared, my problem thought might be, “I’ll never make a friend like that again, so I’ll be lonely at school this year.” You can ask kids different questions to try and understand their thoughts. For example: “What do you think will happen after your friend moves?”, “What about your friend moving do you think is making you scared?” or “What is going through your mind right now?”

3. Work together to ask questions like detectives.

Now, let’s investigate this thought. First, we have to check: how true is this thought?

Some example questions to ask include:

• Is this thought likely to happen? Is it the worst possible outcome?
• What facts make this thought seem more true? What facts make this thought seem less true?
• What would I say to a friend if they had the same thought in this situation?
• Is this thought too extreme? Does it use words like “always” or “never” when reality might be more complicated?
• How have I handled similar situations in the past?

If we decide the thought is unlikely or probably not true, then getting stuck on that thought will not be helpful. If we decide that our scary thought might be true (for example: “I won’t know as many people at school this year”), then we want to ask ourselves, “How will I cope if that does happen?” We’ll feel better making a plan to prepare for the future rather than wondering about all the things that could go wrong.

One of the most important ways to help kids use this skill is to ask questions and have kids generate the answers. This step helps build mental muscles for generating balanced thoughts on their own and keeps the conversation from feeling like an argument.

When we respond to a child’s thought by providing our own answers to these questions, like saying, “You’ll probably make friends this year! Stop thinking so negatively,” it may come off as dismissive, discouraging the child from sharing future scary thoughts.

4. Find a new, more helpful thought to use as a reminder.

Challenging our negative thoughts doesn’t make them disappear, so it’s important to finish our thought challenging by deciding on a new thought that is more true and/or more helpful. This can serve as a reminder if negative thoughts pop up again, and it can be a clue to more balanced thoughts if a brand-new negative thought starts. For our example, a helpful thought could be, “I’ll really miss my friend at school, but I’m glad we’ll still see each other at soccer practice and can keep in touch.”

Remember, the goal is to find helpful and balanced thoughts, not necessarily happy or “positive” thoughts. Thought challenging should target overly negative, repetitive or unhelpful thoughts.