Parenting

lifestyle Parenting

Support your child’s wellbeing through colour psychology

Colour psychology is the exploration of how different hues can impact our moods, both positively and negatively. Kent Blaxill investigates the top colour choices for your home that will bolster your children’s creativity, learning and mental wellbeing.

Calm a bedroom with beautiful blues

Research shows that the colour blue can help guide babies into a relaxing sleep. Its calming effects are so powerful that evidence suggests it can help active children with a lot of energy to relax. St Giles Blue from Farrow & Ball paint is a nice balance between vibrant and muted and makes a good base colour for children and babies’ bedrooms. The International Journal of Advanced Research published a study that showed blue appears to stimulate creativity in children too.

Yellow to spark learning

Many people associate yellow with joy; it’s positive, bright and sunny. This means it’s the perfect mood booster for both adults and children. A landmark 1993 academic study found that children respond positively to bright colours like yellow as opposed to dark colours. It’s also associated with better concentration and memory, meaning it’s a great colour to incorporate into your child’s learning. Many recommend its use in nurseries, but at home, you could incorporate this with a yellow desk in your child’s room, or with yellow pencils, paper, or books. Psychologists recommend using yellow as an accent colour rather than painting a whole room with it.

Coming back to earth with green

Green is both grounding and calming. It immediately conjures images of nature and tranquillity. The colour has so many positive effects on children that it’s hard to know where to start. Like blue, it can help children relax and even help babies drift off into a peaceful sleep. While yellow is a great learning colour because of its ability to increase concentration and memory, green is a great addition because it can increase reading speed and a child’s understanding of text. These attributes mean green is fantastic as the main colour of a child’s bedroom, in their classroom at school, or at home. We would recommend a more subdued hue; these softer colours more closely resemble the greens we’ll find in nature for maximum relaxing effects.

Balance it out with brown and beige

Brown and beige can be relaxing, and they work brilliantly to complement bolder shades. These neutral colours are essential to balancing out the bright colours that inspire joy and creativity and schools often make use of these earthy tones. They tend to come in the form of light wooden furniture, but these tones may also be found on tables and classroom walls post-nursery. This isn’t simply because they’re common interior colours, but instead because research shows too many bright colours can be distracting and overwhelming.

No phone zone!

Parents’ support for a mobile ban in schools is growing, up to 57% from 49% two years ago according to Uswitch.com. Three quarters of parents (74%) claim mobiles are a distraction, three in five (61%) believe a ban would cut bullying and a quarter (24%) believe it would reduce peer pressure to buy premium handsets. Parents of children in primary school are more likely to call for a ban, with 69% believing that schools should be a no phone zone, compared to 48% of parents with children in secondary education. With a Government-enforced nationwide ban on mobile phones in schools potentially on the horizon, over seven million parents say their child’s school has already taken measures to implement a crackdown on mobile devices in the classroom.

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My name is Michelle, and I am passionate about what I do. I work locally as a Celebrant, in and around Orpington. Having been an Orpington resident for most of my life, I feel it is important to work closely with the community that I live in, and as a result of that, I have also co-founded The Bereavement Café in Orpington. So, my role as a Celebrant is to work with families who have lost a loved one and help them create a unique and fitting ceremony, to help them say goodbye. But I have also introduced something called, “Remember Me” and that is to help people document their wishes before they die. This is a really simple way of instructing your loved ones with what you want, when that time comes. We can discuss everything from music choices, your life story, colours, themes, and have it all recorded safely, so that when the time comes your family members aren’t left scratching their heads trying to work out what you would have wanted.

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