Mood check

#mood#check#feelings#reflection

A recurring mood check gives a child a fixed moment to notice and name how they feel, calmly and without anything having gone wrong. A picture makes the feeling concrete to point at. See the support below.

A child beneath a scale of four mood faces with an arrow.

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Mood check

A child beneath a scale of four mood faces with an arrow.

About this visual support

A mood check differs from the question how are you in an important way: it is built into the day and does not come only when something has already gone wrong. When it returns regularly, for example every evening, the child gets to practise pausing and checking in while everything is calm, which is much easier than putting words to a strong feeling in the middle of it.

Visual support makes the check concrete and without demands. With a scale of faces to point at, the child does not have to form a sentence, only choose the picture that fits best. It gives a shared language for how the day feels, and over time these small moments build a habit of noticing your own state before it grows large.

A tip: keep the check short and regular, the same time each day, and let the child choose without you judging the answer. Simply receiving the face builds trust. In the Routined app you can add the mood check as a recurring step, so it becomes an obvious little pause rather than something extra to remember.