Janai Mestrovich strives to help children manage their emotions
By Debora Gordon for Ashland.news
Grandma Boom, also known as Janai Mestrovich, teaches what she describes as “superkid power” to young children to help them manage their emotions and have positive interactions with others.
Born and raised in Kansas City, Kansas, Mestrovich earned her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Family and Child Development with a focus on early childhood and community service at Kansas State University.
She developed an interest in helping others began early. “When I was a little girl, I wanted to be Santa and was so disappointed that I was a girl, and couldn’t do it, so I created the Christmas Fairy.”
Before moving to Ashland about 12 years ago, Mestrovich spent 27 years in the forest six miles west of Drain, Oregon. “I came here and became the Christmas Fairy for Ashland in the parades.”
A spiritual experience
Mestrovich feels a connection with the unseen world.
“When I was 13, I was given a vision about the world’s children,” she says. “It was a spiritual experience. I knew it was my life’s work. I told my parents, “I’m not going to school any more. I’m going to join the Peace Corps, go around the world and I’m going to help children.” But her father said: “No, you’re going to finish high school and then you’re going to go to college.”
But Mestrovich remained committed. “Being given the vision is a responsibility,” she says, “and I still act on that all these years later, because you don’t turn your back on a vision that’s given to you. I’m very intuitive; I’ve had extraordinary experiences all my life and I’ve learned to trust that it’s just normal.”
Although she did not join the Peace Corps, Mestrovich developed her own unique and holistic approach to teaching and for helping children to learn, as she describes it, “because I use all five senses.”
Mestrovich has built on her own experience teaching: “It’s more than social emotional learning; I’m really a pioneer. No one else is doing what I’m doing. And my work is based on research done with biofeedback. I work with the mind-body emotions, connected with the breathing as a system and how we can get feedback, within ourselves, which is scientifically based.”
She says she teaches young children the basis for self-regulation, explaining, “you have to know the difference between tense and calm.”
She may give children both soft and rough objects to hold as she instructs them to hold the rough object in one hand, explaining that “when we are tense and stressed out, knots get tied up inside us which block energy flow, and, in the other hand, a sock, which is soft and calm, so we have to learn to go from tense to calm.”
Engaging the senses
Mestrovich describes this as “the inner steering wheel,” and offers specific types of art experiences that go with it.
“I want to work with all the senses,” she says, and she has a range of activities that focus on all five senses, often asking the students to notice the difference between feeling calm and feeling stressed through a variety of activities engaging each sense. Additionally, she includes breath work, suggesting deep breaths to “breathe out the knots and feel it in our bellies.”
Other activities use rice crackers and marshmallows, again focusing on the differences between tense and calm.
“Every single lesson I do all of this stuff. We’re going to go inside of ourselves; we going to feel tension in our jaws when we have to chew a tense snack, and we’re going inside our bodies, feeling the difference, because in today’s culture, we are top-heavy in terms of mental activity, with all the electronics and the stimulus, and we’re not teaching children to tune in to their bodies, and that’s where you have to pay attention, so this is what I would give you.”
Another tactile feature of her instruction involves having each child place a small colored bead on their heart area, asking the students to eat a crunchy food or a soft food, or listen to the boom or the chime, and so on for each of the senses.
Mastering self-control
“When we get upset, we can learn to touch into ourselves; touch our control button, we all have a choice and we all can have self-control. So, if we touch our heart area something happens immediately. We’re touching into ourselves. And we can do our slow, deep breathing. We can go from tense to calm.
“One of the goals of this when we are really self-actualized, we can say, “Hey, I’ve had a stressful day but I’m okay, I’ve got my skills, I can do this.” Students are encouraged to touch the heart area and do slow deep breathing, tense to calm. “We can turn our inner steering wheel,” she says.
“I keep hoping someone would discover me. I’ve done this for 47 years and I scramble to try to get funding constantly. I am boots on the ground and this is a really important thing that I live with; to prioritize the children and get these skills into their lives in order to change what the future looks like on the planet right now. We need their help; they need us to help them get these skills, and then we need them to help with what needs to change. I’m planting seeds constantly. I am not bored with life. I don’t believe in boredom. There’s too much need and too many things that can be done.
“I keep going,” she says.
And Grandma Boom is available. Check her out at her websites: SuperkidPower and Grandma Boom.
Ashland Creatives features writers, artists, musicians, actors and other creatives who live in Ashland. Email Debora Gordon at [email protected] if you are a creative artist or would like to suggest someone to feature.
Debora Gordon is a writer, artist, educator and nonviolence activist who recently moved to Ashland from Oakland, California.
