Calming Skills for Young Children

We are all feeling anxious and stressed these days. As adults, we have many ways to cope with our anxiety. Kids often have a tougher time dealing with their emotions.

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Here are a few helpful calming skills every child can practice when they are feeling anxious.

1 > Imagine your favourite place
2 > Deep breathing with a stuffed animal
3 > Picture the people you care about
4 > Think of your favourite things
5 > Positive self-talk
6 > Take a drink of water
7 > Take a short walk
8 > Recite the alphabet slowly
9 > Run water over your hands
10 > Make a fist then release it

Good resources

Need more ideas on how to help your child self-soothe and calm themselves. These books are great to add to your library.

Calm Mindfulness for Kids

Teach your kids how to focus their thoughts and notice the world around them with this fun mindfulness kids activity book.

Breathe like a Bear

Breathe Like a Bear is a beautifully illustrated collection of mindfulness exercises designed to teach kids techniques for managing their bodies, breath, and emotions.

The Mindfulness Journal for Kids

Short and sweet prompts and activities kids can do in just a few minutes, anytime and anywhere.

I’d like to know, which of the above calming skills work best for your child?

13 Comments

These are great tip! Deep breathing worked great with my children when they were growing up and I use it myself.

Thanks for the great tips! I wish I would have had them when my kids were little. Good to know, though, for dealing with my grandchildren.

Deep breathing always helps for my middle daughter.

Great tips for adults as well.

This are great coping mechanisms for everyone.

Love this ideas. Kids do need this.

I love these tips, very interesting

These are good tips to calm adults too.

These are wonderful ideas to calm young ones and perhaps even grown-ups.

These work for me too! adults and kids! great reminder

These are fantastic tips

Great tips, I feel sorry for the young kids, they don’t understand what’s going on and why they can’t see or play with their friends, my grandchildren are really struggling right now, all they want to do is go back to school and be in their classroom with their teacher and classmates