Of Buckets and Bobbies

By Faigie Horowitz

Bucket filler is a phrase cuJTently used in character education and teach­ing self-regulation for positive men­tal health. Many educational settings, even those for young children, use the concept of bucket filling to educate children about feelings and emotions.

The message is that each person carries with them an invisible bucket and when that bucket is full, the person feels happy, confident, secure, calm and content. A bucket’s purpose is to hold good thoughts and good feelings about oneself. You feel very happy and good when your bucket is full.

The buckets of other people are also part of the education. Kids are encouraged to use actions and words to make someone else feel good about them­selves, to fill their buckets with positivity and compliments.

The bucket concept is therefore a dou­ble pronged tool. It helps a child become aware of feelings, both positive and neg­ative, and to express the need to fill the bucket when he or she is feeling low. At the same time, it makes the child aware of the importance of kindness to others. Fill­ing the buckets of others is empowering to the child. He can have an impact on the other person.

Further development of the buck­et analogy is the phrase bucket dipping. Teasing, bullying, and being unkind to someone takes away from that person’s bucket. It’s stealing good feelings from someone else’s bucket. It decreases good feelings in the other person.

Taking it even further for kids who un­derstand the language and the concepts, teachers and therapists talk to kids about the tendency of bucket dippers to have empty buckets of their own. They hurt others with mean words because of their own emptiness and negative feelings.

There are lots of preschool books writ­ten about these concepts which you can use with your grandchildren. If they are already using this language in school or therapy, it’s especially helpful to learn and use it.

The third phrase used in this kind of work with chil­dren’s self-awareness of feelings is using your lid.That means cov­ering your bucket, your store of good feelings to protect the good thoughts that have been gathered. Putting a lid on it means develop­ing a mental shield to deal with negative situations so the positivity inside is not reduced. The phrase can be very empow­ering.

This is key to developing resilience to deal with negative interpersonal re­lationships and other challenges. It’s the highly developed version of the primitive sticks-and-stones-will-break-my-bones­but-names-will-never-harm-me language.

We can help our grandchildren deal with their stressors by talking things out. Most important is naming their emotions. Name it to tame it, as the psychologist Dan Siegal says. Naming it mitigates the intensity. It’s a step towards self-regula­tion.

Thanks to research psychology, we now know more about helping children handle their feelings. And thanks to time­less Jewish values of menschlichkeit, chesed, and bechira we can connect these to the bucket concept.

Is it our job to teach them to be bucket fillers and not bucket dippers? No.

But we can influence our grandchil­dren in our loving role as interested adults who shower them with affection. We are more than chocolate dispensers and tak­ers-on-outings. We are influencers who can help the grandchild identify his feel­ings and handle them.

Faigie Horowitz, MS is a write,; polit­ical advocate, and nonprofit veteran who serves as the rebbetzin of Agudas Achim of Lawrence. She is a co-founder of JWOW!, Jewish Women of Wisdom, a communi­ly of/rum midlife women, which can be accessed at https://www.jewishwomenofwisdom.org