social coping skills Archives - Hope 4 Hurting Kids

Coping Skills, Emotions

Please Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff (Coping Skills)

Please Don't Sweat The Small Stuff

The first step in helping kids (or anyone for that matter) to deal with and process the difficult emotions in their lives is to help them understand and name emotions. At Hope 4 Hurting Kids, we use the Super Simple Feelings Management Technique for that. Once we have helped kids to understand their emotions, we need to provide them with means for dealing with those emotions.

The second step towards emotional maturity and healing is to develop a robust set of coping skills. Coping Skills are designed to help “take the edge” of emotions and assist us in dealing with them. Unfortunately, that moment when a young person is drowning in emotions is not the right time to start thinking about coping mechanisms. Instead, it is important that kids and teens have at their disposal a tool box full of coping mechanisms that work for them that they can draw from in a time of crisis.

At Hope 4 Hurting Kids, we’ve developed another mnemonic to help keep track of the many different types of coping mechanism. This time we borrowed from the title of a popular book series by Richard Carlson. The different types of coping skills can be readily recalled by remembering the phrase:

Please Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff

July 25, 2017 by Wayne Stocks

Coping Skills

Using Cool Down Cubes to Help Kids Deal With Emotions

It’s important to teach kids ways that they can calm down when they are angry or anxious or stressed out. In the heat of overwhelming emotions though, it’s easy for kids to forget the methods you have taught them. That’s why if you work with kids, it useful to have a jar full of cool down cubes, and it’s simple too!

Just buy some plastic ice cubes. I got mine from Five Below after the Fourth of July.
Write various calm down techniques on the cubes (one per cube). Permanent marker works best. We’ve included a list of the techniques we put on the cubes below.
Put the cubes in a jar. We used an old peanut jar, but anything large enough that a child can reach their hand in will work. Decorate the jar however you want.
Whenever the child you are working with upset, encourage them to go to the Calm Down Jar, pick one cube out and use the technique on the cube to calm down. If that doesn’t work encourage them to pick another cube.
Feel free to engage in the activity with the child, and when they have calmed down use the opportunity to talk about what’s bothering them.

Here are some of the calm down techniques we put on our cubes (feel free to make up your own):