5 Tools To Support Your Anxious Child
Anxiety, worry, nervousness, concern - whatever we call it, anxiety is one of the most common emotional experiences for both children and adults. As adults, we’ve often learned valuable skills to understand and manage our worries. For children, however, these feelings can be confusing and distressing without guidance.
By providing children with education, positive strategies, and practical tools, we can help them develop emotional literacy and regulation skills - empowering them to face challenges with confidence and resilience.
Learning About Worry
Worry Educational Poster for Children
To manage anxiety, we first need to understand it. This easy-to-use poster helps children recognise what worry is, what it feels like, and how it shows up in their bodies and behaviours.
The Worry Educational Poster for Children breaks worry down into simple, child-friendly language and visuals. It explains that worry is a normal emotion, but that it can grow stronger if left unchecked. This poster is an excellent resource for parents, teachers, and professionals who want to open up conversations about worry and support children in developing awareness and early coping skills.
Relaxation and Calming Activities
Once children understand what worry is, the next step is learning how to regulate it. The Calm Down Kit Activity, Bubble Blowing Relaxation Activity, and the Mindful Noticing Activity for Children are hands-on, engaging tools that teach calming and grounding strategies in an enjoyable way.
The Calm Down Kit Activity helps children explore what brings them comfort and calm during moments of anxiety. They can identify items, actions, and techniques - such as soft toys, breathing exercises, or sensory tools - that help them feel better. Families can even create a real-life calm down kit to keep nearby for when anxiety strikes, giving children immediate and practical support.
Our Bubble Blowing Relaxation Activity offers a fun and interactive way to introduce deep breathing, one of the most effective anxiety-management techniques. By focusing on blowing slow, steady bubbles, children naturally learn to control their breath - inhaling deeply and exhaling slowly. Parents can use this as a playful exercise during calm moments, or add bubbles to a child’s Calm Down Kit to encourage mindful breathing when they’re feeling anxious or upset.
Mindful Noticing Activity for Children is a mindfulness-based activity which teaches children to focus on the present moment through their senses - what they can see, hear, feel, smell, and taste. It’s an excellent grounding exercise for when anxious thoughts pull them toward the past or future. Practising mindful noticing helps children find calm, reduce rumination, and develop long-term self-regulation skills.
Creating Safety At Home
When children feel anxious, their bodies often interpret it as a sign of danger. The My Safe Space Activity helps them identify what makes them feel safe - whether it’s a person, place, or object. By creating a visual or written representation of their “safe space,” children build self-awareness around what supports their emotional security. Parents can reinforce this by helping children access or imagine their safe space during times of distress.
Supporting children to manage anxiety isn’t about eliminating worry altogether, it’s about giving them the skills to understand, express, and regulate it. Using simple, engaging tools like these helps children build self-awareness, emotional confidence, and lifelong coping strategies.
At Psychology Resource Hub, we’re passionate about creating evidence-based, practical, and visually engaging resources that make emotional learning approachable and fun. Explore our full range of child anxiety and emotional regulation activities to empower the young minds in your care to grow calm, confident, and resilient