Managing Kids Emotions With The Calm Caterpillar Feelings Poster
By understanding the right coping skills, it can make all the difference to managing kids emotions. This is incredibly important as mental health issues in children are on the rise in America, with anxiety, behavior problems, and ADHD seen in about 10% of children. In fact, a little under 5% (4.4%, to be exact) of children have reported suffering from depression, which amounts to approximately 2.7 million depressed children overall.
For parents, teachers, specialists, and Americans in general, this is a cause of concern, and has left many people wondering what not only the cause of this could be, but what, exactly, can be done to help kids deal with troubling issues.
From social media to peer relationships to familial conflict, there are many issues that can be the cause of a child’s emotional troubles.
There are many emotion-focused coping skills and activities that work effectively at managing kids emotions, here are some examples that you can integrate in your home or classroom:
Emotion-Focused Coping Strategies for Kids
A lot of kids deal with negative emotions like stress or frustration. Every child (and adult, for that matter) can benefit from coping strategies.
A coping strategy is an effort to regulate our minds to adjust to something that we perceive to be upsetting, negative, stressful, or the like.
Learning coping skills to deal with difficult emotions can not only restore kids to a greater sense of control in their personal life and behavior. It can also help them in certain ways if they do indeed suffer from deeper issues such as an anxiety disorder, to lessen the effects of these problems.
The advice we give below is based on our Calm Caterpillar Feelings Poster, which gives kids a go-to visual reminder for how to gain power over how they feel in times of stress.
The Calm Corner
It is important for parents to create an environment that allows kids to self-regulate, in a simple term, a Calm Corner.
"It is important for parents to create an environment that allows kids to self regulate, in a simple term, a Calm Corner.
Having a space that the child associates with calmness and peace is the first step to making coping with negative emotions much easier. For a child, there is comfort and relief to be found in the fact and idea that there is a literal, physical place that they can go to where they can gain control over their emotions.
Calm Corner Activities
Meditation and breathing exercises are one of the best things that kids can engage in to calm down.
A simple coping strategy is a breathing exercise called “hand breathing.” This involves tracing each finger from the bottom of your palm, breathing in when the finger goes up and breathing out when it goes down.
Hand breathing gives kids a gentle reminder that no matter where they are in the world, they have the power to change the way they feel with their hands and their breath.
For more breathing exercises that make for great calm corner activities, see our blog on the topic here.
The Calm Corner Kit
Looking to make your home a more calm environment? Check out our Calm Corner Kit, which includes a meditation cushion specially designed for accommodating breathing exercises, an expandable breathing ball (which makes breathing exercises a lot of fun for kids), and our hand breathing poster.
Also, the Calm Corner Kit also gives you access to the Parent Field Guide, which can give you the tools and tips you need to keep your home environment calm with our evidence-based breathing techniques.
The Calm Caterpillar Is Here to Help
Have any more questions about our products and techniques? Contact us today!
