5 Apps to Help You Manage Your Family’s Mental Health and Well-being
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PSN Team 
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Welcome to Springtime Wellness
It’s almost springtime and by now you have likely settled into the new year. Perhaps you are crushing your new year’s goals or maybe you feel like you are barely surviving? We get it.
Discover New Apps for Family Well-being
We, at BridgingApps, have been keeping an eye out for new and exciting apps to help you manage your family’s overall health and well-being through activities like journaling, meditation, and more. Take a look at the apps we are highlighting in this issue and then feel free to explore our database for more options.
Kidly: Bedtime Books, Sleep – Cultivating Growth Through Stories
Let’s start with an app that is loaded with stories to support your child’s physical, cognitive, social, and emotional development. Kidly: Bedtime Books, Sleep has a library of titles with themes related to mindfulness, yoga, self-worth, environmental awareness, science, and more. With titles like, “Ouchie”, a story that introduces a tiny girl that helps the main character deal with getting blood drawn in the hospital, the app teaches coping skills through real-life situations. There are various ways that children can explore the stories in the app including listening to the stories read aloud from beginning to end while they simply watch or by reading it independently and “turning” the pages by touching the screen when they are ready to move on.
Finch: Self-Care Pet – Learning Through Caring
We also love apps that integrate caring for something else, like a plant or pet, to learn about taking better care of ourselves and our family members. One such app is Finch: Self-Care Pet where the user gets to hatch a new baby “birb,”name it, and care for it as it grows bigger by completing tasks in real life such as drinking more water, stating one thing they are grateful for each day, etc. This app makes it fun and easy to practice gratitude and maybe even to learn empathy for others while the user watches their “birb” grow and thrive as a result of their actions.
Exploring Emotions Through Journaling
Another great way to care for yourself and to teach your children to work through their emotions is through journaling. Journaling can be as simple as writing a few sentences about the day’s activities at the end of the day to create a scrapbook or help remember special dates and events or working through complicated or highly emotional situations like a death in the family or moving to a new state or city. There are many journaling apps out there and sometimes it takes trying a couple before finding what works best for you. To help you get started, we are sharing a few of the apps that we like below, happy journaling!
Discover Your Perfect Journaling App
One journaling app geared towards helping children is Mininote- Cute note and diary. This app allows children and teens to share their thoughts, feelings, ideas, and more in a variety of different formats. For older teens and adults are Gratitude- Journal Prompts and Day One Journal: Private Diary. Apple also recently introduced a new built-in app, Journal, that is for iPhone and iPad users. One thing that all of these apps have in common is that they give you helpful writing prompts to help you as you go so that you don’t let the dreaded “writer’s block” keep you from continuing your personal growth. Apple’s built-in Journal app even uses pictures that you have taken throughout that day to help inspire your writing, a great tool to help our children who have difficulty with language talk about events in their lives.
Kidly: Bedtime Book, Sleep
By: Kidly
Free • Offers In-App Purchases
Finch: Self-Care Pet
By: Finch Care Public Benefit Corporation
Free • Offers In-App Purchases
Mininote- Cute note and diary
By: Xiamen iScreen Information Technology Co., Ltd.
Free • Offers In-App Purchases
Gratitude- Journal Prompts
By: MindMelody Technologies Pte. Ltd
Free • Offers In-App Purchases
Day One Journal: Private Diary
By: Bloom Built Inc
Free • Offers In-App Purchases
Journal
By: Apple
Free
Check out BridgingApps App Search Tool to search for apps, create lists and even share them.
BridgingApps, a program of Easter Seals Greater Houston, is a community of parents, therapists, doctors and teachers who share information about using mobile devices with people who have special needs.
Amy Fuchs is the Program Manager at BridgingApps and a former special education teacher. Amy Barry is the Digital Marketing Lead at BridgingApps and mother of five children.
Cristen Reat is co-founder of BridgingApps and a mother who found success when using a mobile device with her younger son who has multiple disabilities. We share a passion for using mobile technology to enhance the lives of people of all ages with disabilities.
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This post originally appeared on our March/April 2024 Magazine
