If you have, or work with children 2 or older, you are well acquainted with the seemingly impossible task of attempting to calm down an emotionally overwhelmed and upset child. While using distractions to de-escalate children can work wonders, it doesn’t empower children to manage their own emotions, rather it can potentially cause the child to suppress their emotions, or believe that you are afraid of their feelings. So in order to teach little kids how to navigate strong and overwhelming feelings, begin by modeling and teaching these two tools to bring their bodies back into a state of calm.

Deep Breathing and Grounding

There are two really great tools to help a child learn to self-regulate themselves when they are hyperaroused, by encouraging them to attune to their body and re-establish felt safety. In order to escalate your child, I strongly encourage you to practice these techniques with your child while they are calm, before attempting to teach them to do these things mid-meltdown.

First let’s talk about Grounding, one of the simplest ways to have your child ground themself is to have them push their feet against the ground and practice feeling their feet on the ground. Or even better, have them step outside barefoot and do it. Basically, you are encouraging the child to reconnect to their body, there are many ways to do this, such as handing the child an object and have them focus on describing its details, such as color, shape, weight, texture and so on. Another way is to have the child practice tensing and then relaxing their muscles.

You can do this by having them follow along to this video and practice freezing and melting their muscles. You can do this with kids as young as 2 and most kids find it very relaxing.

Another great grounding activity to help kids of all ages is to teach them to engage their five senses. To do this have your child watch this video and follow along. If the child is really young, just have them list one thing for each of the five senses.

Another calming and grounding activity little kids and toddlers can use when they are worried or very emotional are butterfly hugs.

If you want to learn more about grounding, this brief video explains what grounding is, and gives a simple activity a young child can do when there overwhelmed with emotions.

Deep Breathing

Make sure you teach your kids how to take proper deep breaths during grounding activities. Try this video to help your child breathe and self-regulate. Remember to practice while they are calm so they can get the hang of it.

Or you can have them try Rainbow Breathing as well. 

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