Beyond Breathing: Creative Approaches to Mental Health for Kids with Cassie Brooks

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In this enlightening episode, we're joined by award-winning educator Cassie Brooks, who shares practical strategies for teaching mental health skills to children. With 25 years of middle school health education experience, Cassie offers invaluable insights on how parents, teachers, and coaches can model and teach mental wellness techniques.

Cassie discusses the importance of normalizing mental health conversations, comparing emotional pain to physical pain like headaches to reduce stigma. She shares specific techniques including the Tapping Solution, the value of creating personalized mental health self-management plans, and how to implement calming activities that children can choose based on their preferences.

As president of the Indiana Society for Health and Physical Educators and a volunteer ambassador for Erica's Lighthouse, Cassie also highlights resources available to support youth mental health education. This episode provides actionable tools for anyone looking to better equip young people with skills to manage their emotional wellbeing.

Listen for practical advice on how to move beyond simple breathing exercises to engage children in meaningful mental health practices they'll actually use when they need them most.

Cassie Brooks Bio

Cassie Brooks is in her 25th year of teaching middle school Health and Physical Education in Brownsburg , Indiana. She is currently president of Indiana’s Society for Health and Physical Educators. Cassie has her BA in Health Education from Ball State and a Master’s in Curriculum and Instruction. She was recognized as the Midwest Health Teacher of the Year in 2018. Her career passions include helping health educators move to skills-based teaching and leaning into challenging topics. Cassie is volunteer ambassador for Erika’s Lighthouse and is very involved in her church and community. She loves to hike, kayak, garden, camp, and travel.

Resources

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Episode Transcript

Tom: [00:00:00] Our question for this month is, let me go ahead and read it off. It says, “You share a lot of great ideas on the podcast, but I'm having difficulty teaching them to my child. Do you have any tips on how to present these techniques to kids?” And I think that's a great question. Cause we do talk about all the techniques, but really don't give tips on how to actually explain it.

So this month we are very excited and grateful to have Cassie Brooks with us. Jeannie, I actually saw Cassie speak at a teacher conference in Indianapolis, and she went over this exact topic and gave a ton of tips.

So that's why I asked her to be here. So let me just give you a little bit of background on her. She is in her 25th year of teaching middle school health and physical education in Brownsburg, Indiana. She's currently president of the Indiana Society for Health and Physical Educators.

Cassie has her B. A. in health education from Ball State, and has a master's in curriculum and instruction. She was recognized as a Midwest health teacher of the year in 2018.

Her [00:01:00] career passions include helping health educators move to skills-based teaching and leaning into challenging topics. Cassie's a volunteer ambassador for Erica's Lighthouse and is very involved in her church and community. She loves to hike, kayak, garden, camp, and travel, and the fun fact I saw is her

Jeannie: Uh huh.

Tom: her, her husband, and her two teenage boys manage their church cemetery.

Jeannie: We're going to need to ask about that one!

Tom: We definitely will!

Jeannie: I'm going to need to know,

Cassie: Quite a fun fact.

Tom: I definitely added that to my list of questions. Excellent. Yeah, Cassie, if you could take that first question for us. Any ideas for our listener there on how to help teach this stuff to kids? Tips on that?

Cassie: Yeah, one of the things that I think is really important is that we model what we expect from our kids. When we're teaching little kids how we wash our hands, we do it in front of them. We show them. See, I wash my hands, too. [00:02:00] This is how I do it. And I think a lot of times we do a really good job of teaching kids how to physically take care of themselves, but not so much mentally, emotionally.

And oftentimes, if our kids are having emotions, we're often having emotions, too.

Jeannie: Sure. Sure.

Cassie: Part of it is me. Calming myself down and, I've been teaching middle school health for a long time and my kids know when they see me pause. Close my eyes. Take those deep breaths. They're like, something's happening. And they see that my face just kind of changes.

I will do that to show them I'm consciously choosing, right now, to get myself regulated better.

Um, so I'll model that for them. The other thing is I do a lot with stigma and reducing stigma.

I begin my unit on mental health by talking to kids [00:03:00] like, do you guys ever have headaches? I get headaches every once in a while, you know, have you ever had a really bad headache? Yeah. Yeah. They usually have. When you have a headache, you don't hide and pretend you're fine,

When you have a headache, you might say to people, yeah, I have a headache right now. Um, sorry, I'm having a hard time focusing. Or you might say, I just need to take a break for a little bit. And we take care of ourselves when we have that physical pain in our head.

But sometimes, adults included, we don't do the best job of taking that break and asking for help and letting people know when we're struggling with emotional pain. I sometimes forget that it's okay to take a break and it's okay to tell people.

And I'm like, If your friend says, I got a headache or a family member, I've got a headache, You wouldn't say then stop having a headache. Headaches stink.

Jeannie: So true!

Tom: Yeah.

Cassie: You know, you wouldn't say to someone when they're having a headache, [00:04:00] well, then why don't you just tell yourself to not have a headache anymore.

Like it doesn't go away because you wish it away.

Jeannie: Mm hmm.

Cassie: And similarly, when we feel bad, it just doesn't disappear because we want it to disappear. We sometimes need to do things to take care of ourselves. So, I always start by kind of de stigmatizing and Um, sharing when I'm not feeling my best, whether that's because I literally have a headache, which as a middle school teacher, is far too common, but I'm honest about it. And I say, Hey, this is how I'm feeling. This is what I'm doing to try and get better and feel better.

But here's what I might need from you guys to help support me. Can you do that for me? And so when they're sharing about their struggles or, I'm talking about me having a hard day, let them know, hey, it's okay to talk about this. Some people don't tell us when they have a [00:05:00] headache, but people have headaches.

And same thing with our feelings too. We're going to have times where we don't feel okay. And it's okay to say, I could, I could use a little bit of support, you know, because we all need at times some encouragement. Maybe we need help figuring out what to do better that's going to help us feel better because I don't know how to make myself feel better

And you know, sometimes it might even be if I have headaches a lot and those headaches are really starting to get in the way of me being able to do my regular activities, then that's a sign I might need a little bit more help.

I might need to see a professional about that and, and that's okay too.

The more we normalize, talk about mental health struggles and acknowledge that.

Everybody struggles at some time. It's not normal to be, I'm happy all the time! Everything's great! Like, we really need to take care of ourselves. And sometimes that includes [00:06:00] admitting, it's not great right now. And I'm having a hard day. Or, I've had a hard couple of months. That's okay too.

Tom: And it seems like there's more and more resources out there to help people and I know one of the things that you mentioned in the presentation that I saw was was Erika's lighthouse. Can you tell us a little bit about that, who that's for, what that's all about?

Cassie: Yeah, Erica's Lighthouse is kind of my answer because years ago teaching health, I felt like I needed to address mental health. We weren't doing enough.

We really needed to take it seriously. But, I was just, I was afraid of going the wrong direction because it wasn't something I was really well trained for. And Erica's Lighthouse came to our INSHAPE conference, our Society for Health and Physical Education, like Tom came to last year. And they presented a session, and I was like, this is what I need.

What's [00:07:00] so awesome about them is they do depression education, which can sometimes, especially if untreated, can lead towards thoughts and feelings of suicide.

Not always. Many times it doesn't. But if we just look at the end outcome and try to prevent the end outcome without addressing what are the things that we can do all along to take care of ourselves so that depression doesn't progress to the point of feeling thoughts and ideas of self-harm? If we're not teaching those kids who are in the middle, then they're just supposed to, I don't know, get over it.

Jeannie: Sure.

Cassie: Erica's Lighthouse really focuses on several different things. They offer classroom education, lessons with videos. And the videos are actually students telling their stories.

Kids of all different backgrounds. There's kind of the, the more science-y kind of a kid. There's a kid who's in a band. There's all these different kids represented and they're talking about [00:08:00] what they do for good mental health and also about how they've gotten help when they were struggling. They've built these empowerment clubs. Geared towards high school and middle school students to be able to have a group that celebrates taking care of your mental health and celebrates good mental health and promotes awareness of, like, it's okay not to be okay.

And those kind of phrases that we hear sometimes, they also, and your audience may be very interested in hearing, provide a ton of family engagement strategies. Now that could be for educators like me to reach out to the families of my students, but they have, um, almost like tutorials on how to talk to your kid about these things. Just different things that you can talk to your kids about, and how to model positive mental health strategies. And even, like, screening tools if you're concerned. So they have a ton of resources for parents there and they even do trainings and [00:09:00] help policy building, whether it's for a school or district or it's another group that's interested and figuring out what, what can we do to help our kids and be stronger supporters.

Jeannie: What an awesome program!

Tom: Cassie, one of the things that you talked about that I don't think we got a chance to actually go into too deep was the tapping solution, which I kind of found, kind of interested me.

So, I was wondering if you could expand on what that is?

Cassie: Sure. When I start with my students talking about our mental health, an easy thing for them to relate to is having stress and feeling it worked up in our bodies and what do we do to calm ourselves down? So, I share with them and I'll give this to you guys so you can include it, um, this is kind of a choice board of different things that they can do to calm down in the moment.

And there are some active things like pushing really hard against a wall that won't move. Or it might [00:10:00] be a breathing strategy. Um, one of them that I love to do with all of my students, as I was researching different ways to teach, is the Tapping Solution, the Tapping Solution Foundation and they have a website and they've got these diagrams and they're basically based on the premise that we have these sensitive places in our nervous system where applying, like we've heard of acupuncture or acupressure, in this case it's a gentle, soft tapping rhythm to specific places on our bodies. And so, they have the karate chop position as one of them. And then you go to, um, the eyebrows and you breathe deeply and just tap.

And you cross your arms like you're giving yourself a hug, and get yourself on the side of the ribcage. I tell them this one, Hey, you could do this sitting at your desk and nobody even knows you're doing it.

And you breathe. And it just helps to calm the nervous system. I let them pick a couple of them for the first 10 minutes of class and just relax and they love to color. Coloring is a big thing

Jeannie: Cool.

Cassie: that they like to do and I've even discovered that, you know what, that actually makes me feel pretty good, too. And I have coloring sheets that have some positive phrases on them.

Jeannie: Oh, I love that. I love that.

Cassie: It's great.

Tom: I think those are so good because, you know, a lot of times you'll get kids who say, I just, I can't do the breathing. The breathing doesn't help me or anything. So, if you could do the tapping so they could focus on that, even though they are still breathing, the focus is on the tapping or the coloring that's still kind of helping them to relax.

Cassie: Absolutely! And I like sitting in child's pose. I've got walk outside or look out the window for five minutes. Count how many different colors you can see. [00:12:00] So I give um, I've got 25 different things on there that they can choose from.

Tom: To give them all those options, and then they can pick what's, you know, what works best for them. And that actually reminds me of another thing you kind of talked about was a mental health self-management plan that, that people would create. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Cassie: Yeah. So when it comes down to it, I teach skills. The health education standards have a standard that students will demonstrate practices that support health and wellness. So, it's about giving kids the skills that they need for no matter whatever they might face in their life, they're going to be prepared for it versus I could do what some health teachers do and have them learn about schizophrenia and bipolar disorder and things that may be scary to some of them.

And some of it they won't even need to know, or they won't remember, and it's [00:13:00] not all that helpful to them. They need to know how to calm down in the moment. They need to know how to communicate.

And so back to the mental health self-management plan, as Tom was talking about, and I'll send this to you as well. It gives them places to write in.

Um, if I feel stressed out, I will. And there's three blanks for physical activities. What are things you, do you like to shoot hoops? Do you like to do push-ups? Do you like to go for a walk? What do you like to do as a physical activity? How do you use up your muscle energy safely? Is it? Punching that pillow?

Screaming in the pillow? Breathe these ways. And they'll always say, in and out. Like, yeah, right. We, we already do that. So, give me something new. So, infinity breathing. Square breathing, and then they go in, fill in their plan. Um, so when they get to a moment of, oh my goodness, my head is going to explode. I'm so frustrated or upset or sad or hurt, whatever it may [00:14:00] be. They have ideas of what to write or draw. They have ideas already written down where to go when they feel that way, who they can talk to, what can they say in their head, a mantra or a one word to kind of calm them and get them centered again.

And I tell them, this goes in your sock drawer and they go, what? I'm like, okay, not everybody has a sock drawer. But when I was growing up, I had a little drawer just for socks. There's like nothing else fitting there, just for socks. And when I wanted to hide something from my brothers, I hid it in my sock drawer.

Because you know what they didn't ever go looking for? Is my socks.

Jeannie: Never.

Cassie: So, think about where is your safe place. And the goal of it is really, we think about these things while we're calm.

And we can think. Because we learn about how stress limits their ability to think because they're just in [00:15:00] survival mode. You can't think of who can I go talk to, where can I go to, what can I draw a picture of, what can I be writing about, what, what was that thing I was going to say in my head to calm myself down?

You're not going to remember that, but you can go to your sock drawer and pull out that list and you’re set.

Tom: Wow. So many great resources, so many great ideas, you know, leading us back to that question for that, that parent. How do you teach this stuff? I think, you know, self management plan, thank you so much for sharing some of those resources as well. Uh, last question I've got, which we have to get back to, tell us about the cemetery.

Jeannie: I gotta know. I got to know.

Cassie: All right. Well, I attend a small church that dates back to I think they were founded in 1851 is when they established themselves. They had been meeting for a while in homes prior to that. But we're talking pioneers in Indiana. And they built a sanctuary in 1881. And across the [00:16:00] street from that is the cemetery and it's just a little church graveyard.

Really? It dates back though to 1837 so before even the church was there it was just the land of some of the people that started that community and that church. And it was like their family land and that's where their family was buried. We still do burials today, and I'm one of the younger people in my church, and they were like, hmm, I'll bet she and her husband could mow that grass without breaking their backs, unlike some of the rest of us.

So, they asked us if we would do that, and my husband started doing the mowing, and they're like, can we teach you guys how to mark graves for when they have to do a burial? And I was like, yeah, why not? Yeah, sure.

Jeannie: Yeah.

Cassie: We can do that. And so, my husband and my boys go out usually when we get a death notification and it's not a lot. I mean, a busy year is [00:17:00] like three in a year. And, uh, we go out, we mark the grave and I attend funerals for people I don't know.

Jeannie: That's

Tom: Wow

Jeannie: That is so cool! What a unique random thing! That's such a fun fact!

Cassie: You know, the game, uh, two truths and a lie.

Jeannie: Yes. Yes.

Cassie: It's really good for that game. Cause people are like pioneer cemetery? Who does that? Cassie Brooks, Cassie Brooks does that.

Jeannie: Cassie, thank you so much. This was such an awesome conversation. Stuff that I'm going to take away for myself. Thank you so much for the time. And we, we appreciate ya.

Cassie: You're very welcome.

Tom Klisiewicz