The Hug Journal

I recently had a few readers share with me how much they LOVE the Hug Journal in their house! While ours moves pretty slow back and forth, it’s still going and it’s always a fun surprise when I find it on my nightstand.

We started the Hug Journal a few years ago and I wanted to re-share it for my newer readers!

Back in 2021, I enrolled in Jen Harrison’s amazing coaching program for highly sensitive children. Week after week I took away so many incredible parenting strategies for planting seeds of confidence, resilience, and connection in my kiddos. During one of our sessions, we discussed journaling with kids. Journaling can be a powerful tool for discussing feelings, processing big emotions, cementing memories, connection, and SO much more.

At the end of our session, I immediately ran to Target and bought $5 notebooks for me and each kid to pass notes and pictures back and forth — and named it…our Hug Journal.

Both kids were really excited when I gifted them their journals and over the past few years we’ve filled the pages together with so many fun notes, memories, drawings, and more. We started these journals when the kids were 6 and 7, but you could totally start these as soon as your kid can hold a crayon! In fact, my kids are now 9 and 10, and these notes mean even more to them now that they are older. I especially love writing to them before big tests at school, games, and performances.

With their permission, I am sharing a few of the older pages from our journal in hopes this helps you see how easy and fun these can be. Sometimes I go all out and draw them a fun picture. Sometimes I write them a longer, more serious note. Sometimes I just scribble down a joke. It’s a surprise every time.

While the entries started out mostly with soldiers going to battle from Thomas, and smiley faces with sweet notes from Caroline, my hope is for the words I share with them to leave a positive imprint in their minds about how amazing they each are and that they feel hugged through words every time they open their notebook.

And as they continue to grow, my prayer is they will see writing to one another as an additional communication tool for bigger and more serious conversations that they may feel reluctant to launch in person. When we first started, our journals were filled with scribbles, misspelled words, and colorful out-of-order pages. Now, they are a bit deeper, and I love it.

As for frequency, some weeks we get on a roll and pass our notebooks back and forth each night or morning. Other weeks they don’t get picked up at all. There isn’t any pressure to write to each other on a certain schedule. I’d say I usually wake up next to a journal maybe once a week (which is always such a fun surprise) and try to respond within a few days. But again, there’s been times that weeks will go by before the next entry is made and that is totally fine too.

Oh, and Caroline also told me to make sure I mention that “everyone should have a hug journal!” So there you have it!

If you think this is something your children would enjoy, you should do it! If it fizzles out, you can always try again later!