Calm down Cards

Set of 31 Calm down cards helping you to educate your child on possible coping skills and emotion regulation techniques. Calm down cards involve actions and activities that you would typically do when feeling unpleasant emotions such as; frustration, disappointment or anger.

These activities include breathing, squeezing and releasing, drawing or painting, blowing bubbles, taking a walk, etc.

Reasons to love it:

• Assist in bringing your child back to his/her calming self during a stressful situation or during a meltdown/tantrum.
• Suitable for age 2 + (looking at the pictures and learning the words)
• Suitable for age 4 + (learning about the different calming down activities)
• Suitable for age 6 + ( using the cards to communicate a preffered calming down skill)
  

How it works:

1. Introduce the cards when the child is calm and in a non-stressful environment, talk about the different strategies and see which one your child might be more interested in.
2. When your child is upset or in a meltdown listen and empathise with your child’s feelings, recognise, name and acknowledge their feelings.
   
3. Do not stop the feeling, having unpleasant emotions is not "wrong."
   
4. Use the cards to offer relaxation or calming techniques.
   
5. Ask the child to choose from the deck of cards the activities that they think will help to relax and calm them, like listening to music, drawing or writing in a journal.
   
6. Model how to transform the feeling of frustration and anger using the examples in the cards such as; counting backwards from 10 or imagining a peaceful scene or pretending to blow bubbles.
   
7. Practice the skills together for a few minutes every day.
   
8.  Notice and encourage the child when they use these skills to cope with big feelings. Commend them for becoming resilient.
   
9. Use creatively and with love.
   

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