A collaboration at the University of Connecticut, launched in 2022 for elementary school children during the COVID-19 lockdown, is expanding to pre-school age kids.
The program, called Feel Your Best Self, which also expanded to include middle-and-high school students, is designed to help children regulate difficult emotions by using three felt-covered friends Nico, CJ and Mena. The trio of puppets appear in short videos that are available at no cost to teachers and families, and include a downloadable toolkit.
“We found that there is a high level of interest from early childhood educators,” said Emily Wicks at UConn’s Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry in Mansfield, Connecticut, and co-founder of Feel Your Best Self. “We are creating animated shorts – so they will still have Mina, CJ and Nico – but they're minute-long animated videos that teach those strategies.”
Back-to-school data shows a high level of anxiety and depression in youth, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The data shows that 37% of high school students reported persistent sadness and hopelessness. Almost 1 in 5 students need help with a mental health condition.
Big feelings during back-to-school time can be scary when you’re very young, too.
“I, I just started in a new class this year. And, well, I was worried that I didn’t know anybody in the class. So I had all these big, scary feelings,” said Nico, 6, to a reporter during a recent visit to the Ballard Institute.
Nico – puppeteered by Jerry Harney, a UConn puppetry student specializing in the puppet arts for television – said he learned 12 coping strategies to help. The playbook, part of the Feel Your Best Self program, teaches kids to navigate big emotions using videos, puppet making, lesson plans, tip sheets, strategy cards and more.
Nico’s favorite, he said, incorporates a song called “Shake Out the Yuck.”
“Shake, shake, shake – shake out the yuck! Shake, shake, shake – shake out the yuck!” he sings, dancing along with gusto.
“I try to, I try to just kind of continue on with these big, heavy feelings,” he said. “But, but what I've kind of realized is that when you do that, they just get heavier and heavier and heavier. So I think it's, it's good to kind of just face those problems and, and just kind of face them head on, and then slowly but surely they go away.”
After all that singing and dancing, Nico said he felt much better.
The song, written and performed by Feel Your Best Self implementation coordinator Molly Ferreira, goes: “Shaking out the yuck can look like many different things. Dancing, running, playing tag or maybe try swimming.”
Wicks, of the Ballard Institute, said she goes to the gym after her workday to shake out any lingering yuck.
“We've seen some teachers just spend five minutes a day on it, maybe introducing a strategy, watching one video, and then practicing that strategy throughout the week,” she said. “We have guides online to think about how you might implement ‘Feel Your Best Self’ on a weekly basis, on a monthly basis.”
A growing demand for mental health services
UConn’s expansion of its emotional regulation puppets program comes at a time of rising demand for mental health services among all age groups.
In 2025, 988 CT, a suicide and crisis support lifeline from United Way, handled more than 55,000 calls. That’s 2.5 times the number of callers compared to 2022, when the national 988 three-digit dialing code launched.
“More than 95% of Connecticut callers tell us that their state of crisis diminished during their call with our team,” said Nancy Navaretta, commissioner of the Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services.
Tanya Barrett, senior vice president of 211 Health and Human Services, said that call center specialists take the time to understand each caller’s needs, de-escalate the crisis and offer options for support.
Feel Your Best Self seeks to reach children in a playful way to recognize and manage their emotions before it reaches a crisis stage. The message seems to have stuck, and “Feel Your Best Self” is expanding across the U.S. and abroad, including New Zealand and Nicaragua.
“Puppets are an amazing mechanism, and it's the core of how we have taken what we know in the science of emotion coping and brought it to be fun and widely appealing,” said Sandy Chafouleas, Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor in the Neag School of Education at UConn, and co-creator of the program.
“Everybody stops and pauses when you see our puppet friends to say, ‘Hey, what's going on there?’ But people can take different pathways to think about, ‘How can I bring those strategies into my life?’”
