When Sandy Chafouleas and Emily Wicks recently told an audience of business experts that there is an epidemic in children\u2019s mental health, no one seemed surprised.<\/p>\n
For years, the increase in depression and anxiety among children has been painfully and repeatedly documented in the media, in classrooms, and in overwhelmed emergency rooms.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen kids don\u2019t feel well, they don\u2019t do well in school, in sports, or in life,\u2019\u2019 says Chafouleas, a school psychologist and Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor in the Neag School of Education and Ray Neag Professor of School Psychology. Childhood mental health concerns were growing pre-pandemic, but that disruption caused them to erupt, she says.<\/p>\n
In response, she and Wicks, manager of operations and collections at the Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry at UConn, created \u201cFeel Your Best Self,\u201d a toolkit that offers easy-to-use online materials for educators, parents, and other community providers to help children address and process emotions.<\/p>\n
Later this month, Feel Your Best Self and five other UConn-affiliated startups will compete for $50,000 in prize money during the Wolff New Venture Competition, the School of Business\u2019 premier entrepreneurship event.<\/p>\n
Puppet Kids Demonstrate Emotional Coping<\/strong><\/p>\n During the pandemic, the Ballard Institute shifted from in-person puppet-making workshops to virtual programs, and Wicks began wondering how they could be most beneficial for children. Chafouleas was working on simple strategies to support emotional well-being for children and educators, and the two interests created a perfect storm.<\/p>\n \u201cThis collaboration has been a bit of a happy accident,\u2019\u2019 Wicks says.<\/p>\n With funding from Principal Foundation and the Neag Foundation, the toolkit materials expanded substantially. Short, professionally produced videos feature \u201cpuppet kids\u2019\u2019 that teach 12 simple strategies to promote emotion-focused coping.<\/p>\n The goal is to help children develop skills to calm themselves, \u201ccatch\u2019\u2019 their feelings, and connect with others. Feel Your Best Self materials also include tip sheets to help adults discuss the strategies with children, facilitate guidance-like lesson plans, and directions on how to add puppet-making to creatively build a \u201cfriend\u2019\u2019 with whom to practice calming strategies.<\/p>\n Launched just over a year ago, Feel Your Best Self has already gained a tremendous following and garnered publicity through NPR, Edutopia, Scripps News, and locally on WFSB. The project won a 2023 Kids Screen Award and four Telly Awards for TV and web content.<\/p>\n Chafouleas and Wicks say they have been astonished by the reception that their startup has received, but its success has created another set of problems: requests for physical materials to complement use of what is available for free online.<\/p>\n \u201cEducators and caregivers love the free digital resources, but we almost immediately started to receive requests for physical products to help with the implementation in classrooms and group settings,\u2019\u2019 Wicks says. \u201cWe were hand-cutting and packaging puppet kit parts, but it has been impossible to keep up with the demand.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n In addition to puppet kits, educators reached out to ask about purchasing printed materials including posters, journals, and storybooks to support their use of Feel Your Best Self. Chafouleas and Wicks decided to form a company to develop affordable products to fully enable Feel Your Best Self\u2019s mission to encourage emotional wellbeing through joyful learning and play.<\/p>\n ‘It Wasn\u2019t Something We Even Dreamed Of\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cNeither of us ever thought about creating a business; it wasn\u2019t something we even dreamed of,\u2019\u2019 Chafouleas says. \u201cIt truly grew from the public demand.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n While there are many other emotional-learning programs on the market, the majority are complex, costly, or don\u2019t really focus on the emotional-coping skills used to navigate everyday life, Chafouleas says. Feel Your Best Self responds to those needs.<\/p>\n Last summer, the two collaborators were invited to participate in an entrepreneurship accelerator, the Connecticut Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation (CCEI), Summer Fellowship. Through that program, Chafouleas and Wicks got lessons in business development, fund acquisition, strategy and more.<\/p>\n \u201cWe would have been lost without Summer Fellowship,\u2019\u2019 Chafouleas says. \u201cIt was very rewarding to learn the business skills that we were missing.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n \u201cCCEI Summer Fellowship helped us focus on the steps to make the business a reality,\u2019\u2019 Wicks says. \u201cWe had to ask ourselves, \u2018What will we do next week? Next month? In six months?\u2019\u201d she says. \u201cBeing thrown into the business world and having the ability to work with amazing instructors and mentors was invaluable.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n Millions Could Benefit from \u2018Feel Your Best Self\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n Feel Your Best Self is working with school districts and programs throughout Connecticut, including the Early Childhood Education Program in Waterbury. In addition, it has expanded its reach globally as the founders offer monthly webinars and professional development options.<\/p>\n Chafouleas and Wicks believe that many of the 2 million elementary educators, school psychologists, and counselors in the United States could benefit from the program. The founders\u2019 primary business goal is to raise capital for initial launch with educational settings, but they also see potential to scale the company through growth in the family consumer market.<\/p>\n \u201cAlthough it is designed and presented as a program for children, even adults can learn the techniques, like belly breathing,\u2019\u2019 Wicks says. \u201cWe\u2019re creating life-long coping strategies. The adults have as much fun as the kids. I think more adults need a creative break and to have fun.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The Wolff New Venture Competition will be held on Tuesday, Oct. 17 from 5:30 to 8:30 p.m. at the School of Business\u2019 GBLC, Second Floor, 100 Constitution Plaza, Hartford. All are welcome. Please pre-register at https:\/\/ccei.uconn.edu\/wolff-new-venture-competition<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A startup that grew in response to overwhelming demand<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":121,"featured_media":205440,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2428,1731,1855,1862,1914,2461,2235],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[2105],"class_list":["post-205439","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-educational-psychology","category-entrepreneurship","category-neag","category-busn","category-sfa","category-staff","category-today-homepage"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-07 04:42:22","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205439","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/121"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=205439"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205439\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":205704,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205439\/revisions\/205704"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/205440"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=205439"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=205439"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=205439"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=205439"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=205439"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}