Emotional ABC’s Help Your Child Succeed Review

Disclosure: I was not financially compensated for this post. I received a sample of the product for review purposes. The opinions are my own, based on my personal experience with the product.

While I currently teach my three young children at home, I formally worked as a social worker in the healthcare field for over 14 years. One of the things that I have learned as a parent is that even with a Master’s degree in social work, it is much harder to teach valuable emotional coping skills to my own young children. In fact, this “expert” social worker has been struggling to deal with the unusual emotional outbursts of anger and frustration exhibited by my eight year old son recently.

Therefore, I was very excited to test out the Emotional ABC’s Help Your Child Succeed DVD & Activity Kit (SRP $85 for the entire set) for children and parents. Emotional ABC’s is proud to have received the Creative Child Magazine’s “Product of the Year” award along with other prestigious awards since it was launched. I was very impressed with this comprehensive and unique program that is designed to help children learn necessary emotional coping skills. Recommended for children ages 4 to 9 years old, Emotional ABC’s provides the essential tools to guide parents through the process of teaching learned emotional skills to their children so that the child can identify feelings and make the best possible choices in life.

Each Emotional ABC’s set includes:

• 40 minute DVD
• Five Activity Books
• Moody Music CD
• Playing Cards
• Colorful Mood Stickers
• Emotional ABC’s Toolbar Magnet

My children and I started off by watching the Emotional ABC’s Help Your Child Succeed DVD which is the core of this program. Featuring children of various ages to whom they could relate and an empathetic teacher, this informative DVD is an invaluable resource to introduce the chapters titled, “What Is a Feeling?”, What Feelings Look Like”, “What Feelings Feel Like”, “Learning to Breathe” and more. It also includes a section titled, “The Emotional ABC’s Toolbar: “Pause & Breathe, Rewind, Play”, “Mad”, “Sad” “Worried”, “Guess the Feeling” and “What We Learned”. My children loved the introduction of the adorable animated blue monster named Moody who helps demonstrate the various types of feelings, emotions and real-life situations that children experience on a daily basis. I appreciate that this DVD has short session chapters so that I can choose which area to focus on for a specific lesson and it is the perfect length to hold children’s attention.

We also enjoyed the song CD which includes emotion themed song titles such as “Sad”, “Worried”, “Happy”, “Scared”, “Mad”, “Calm” and more. The instrumental mood music is the perfect way to capture via notes a particular emotion that your child (or you) may be feeling. Our family loves music so we enjoyed playing a game where the children tried to guess the specific emotion being conveyed by the composer for each selection. My son, Adam who appreciates music also listens to this music when he is trying to calm down and control his emotions.

My children really enjoy the five sequential colorful and interesting activity books which include Reading Faces & Bodies, Forecast: Weather (and Feelings) Today!, Sensations: A Coloring Book, The Emotional ABC’s Toolbar and The Emotional ABC’s Workbook. The activities are fun and engaging and of course the cute, not-scary monsters capture the specific emotions perfectly and much to the delight of my children.

The “Go Moody” Playing Cards provides the child with visual clues for how different emotional might look like as the players try to get the most matching sets of cards in this fun learning game. Kids have fun while learning!

Finally, the magnet and stickers are a nice addition to this set. I used the stickers as a positive reinforcement reward when my children did a good job participating in the Emotional ABC’s lesson for that day.

Overall, as a mom and a teacher I am very impressed with the content and educational value of the Emotional ABC’s DVD & Activity Kit. It addresses an often forgotten area of emotions that can easily be overlooked during this critical time of a child’s emotional development. My own son, Adam who is eight admitted to me that it was very helpful to see other children and the monster characters on the DVD and in the activities experiencing the same emotions of overwhelming frustration and even anger that he has felt. He promises to try to use some of the coping techniques that he has learned from this program when he is trying to control those emotions. I will definitely continue to use this program with my children in our homeschool and on an as needed basis.

You are invited to visit the Emotional ABC’s website to learn more about this valuable resource. I highly recommend this for all parents of children ages 4-9 and especially for those who are coping with behavioral issues. It is an effective program in my personal experience and was not only helpful for my children but for me too!