Coping Strategies for Kids

Just like adults, kids often experience different feelings and emotions in a day - from being bored, anxious, sad, disappointed, embarrassed, and scared. Experiencing such changing emotions and feelings without knowing how to deal with them can be challenging and complicated. They need to understand and learn to healthily manage these changing emotions. You can help kids learn to identify and express their feelings by teaching them coping skills.

Coping skills are optimal strategies used to manage a child's feelings and handle their stress levels. With coping strategies, kids can learn how to face their fears, calm anxiety or stress, and cheer themselves up. Healthy coping skills allow kids to control their overwhelming emotions and act responsibly. By using healthy coping skills, you can build and implement healthy habits in a child’s life.

How Do You Teach Coping Skills?

These products and resources from Coping Skills help to teach the skills. There are various approaches that can be used to teach coping skills:

By Practising It Yourself

Ensure Peace and Calmness

Peace and calmness are two critical factors when teaching coping skills. Ensure peace and calmness first before introducing a new coping skill to avoid the rejection of learning.

Use Different Coping Strategies

Every child’s choices, style, taste, and problems differ from one another. No one coping strategy will work for all children, so you should teach a child different coping strategies to determine which work best at any given time.

Maintain Daily Routine

Practising coping skills should become a daily habit or part of a kid's everyday life. By doing so, children will be more likely to use those skills inadvertently.

Common FAQ

• Labelling feelings and emotions
• Practising breathing exercise
• Creating artwork
• Learning positive self-talk
• Play music or watch videos

Coping skills are strategies that can help kids handle their difficult situations and healthily manage overwhelming emotions.

• Help them identify the feeling or emotion
• Allow them to feel bad
• Praise them for using coping skills
• Watch for escapism