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How to help your kids face their fears

Create Your Own Calm is a fun activity book for 6-12 year olds that will help your kids face their fears, written by Becky Goddard-Hill and published by harper Collins. It aims to help kids learn how to manage your feelings and stop them from becoming overwhelming

It is all too easy to TELL kids to calm down but it rarely works.

What kids need to know to know is HOW to calm down and how to do it for themselves

Create Your Own Calm contains 50 activities to help kids feel more in control, clearer and calmer. It helps them to build robust and resilient emotional health.

Create your Own Calm

A helpful book from Becky Goddard-Hill, designed to teach children strategies for coping with their own anxieties and remain calm.

There has never been a better time than now to help our children to cope with their fears, and emotions. Why not take a look to see if your kids, or school could benefit? Try our activity today to get a taste for what the book is all about.

Let’s take a look at the section on fear and an exercise to help kids get past what frightens them.

What is Fear? 

The fears we don’t face become our limits  – anonymous

There are 2 types of fear, instinctive fears and conditioned fears.

Instinctive fears are fears we are born with and these keep us safe. These include things like fear of falling or of fire. These are useful!

Conditioned fears usually come about after one bad experience that makes us afraid of something similar happening again. Perhaps you once got sick in a toilet at school and now you won’t go to the toilet at school (even though you KNOW it only happened once). These fears can become problems. 

Avoiding the things you fear doesn’t get rid of them, it just keeps the fear alive and makes it bigger in your mind.

The science bit

Scientists have found out the we can smell fear and that it is catching! They got a group of men to watch a scary film and then had a group of women (who didn’t know about the scary film) to smell their sweat. The smell of the men’s fear made them fearful too. 

Fear stinks!

So, If you are facing something you are scared of you need calm and confident people around you (who don’t smell of FEAR!) 

A good way to get over fears is to face them step by step this is called exposure therapy. 

How to help your kids face their fears: Activity sheet 

Think of something you are a bit frightened of  (not something you are absolutely terrified of – let’s start small)

If it was me I would choose mice.

Because I am a bit frightened of mice I avoid them, My friend has a mouse and it means I don’t visit her. This means I never get the chance to realise that actually they aren’t that scary. 

So here is my plan to increase my exposure to mice so my fear of them can subside.

  1. I am going to visit my friend who has a pet mouse and sit in the same room with it,
  2. On visit 2 I am going to look at it in its cage for 30 seconds,
  3. On my next visit I am going to look at in its cage for 2 minutes, and
  4. The following visit I am going to gently stroke its head, as she holds it.

Step-by-step I will increase my closeness to it and decrease my fear

Could you make a plan like this perhaps (with help from an adult) to get you closer to what you are scared of?

What would your steps look like? Can you write them in the staircase for the activity sheet we have provided below?

Create your own calm by … tackling your fears step by step

To download the activity – click on the circular image below – any problems with then, let us know as well.

We love Becky and this book, so do go and check it out NOW on Amazon.

Mindfulness and anxiety are a focus for the site, and we have a few resources to help children deal with their emotions as a result:

Here are some other ideas to help children to understand and cope with their feelings and emotions.

We know a few other resources off site too for helping kids to think about kids’ emotions – so do take a look.

Activities to help your kids with their emotions

If you need more ideas to help your kids deal with their emotions then these posts are worth checking out and trying out.

Thanks as always for coming to see us, and we hope that this was a useful activity for your kids, or in the classroom. Do sign up to our weekly newsletter for more of the same wonderful resources.

If you want to support us a little more – do visit our shop too – where over 80% of profits go to charity.

Hope to see you again here soon – have a good day, and keep helping those kids!

Helen

Helen is a mum to two, social media consultant, and website editor; and this site is (we think) the only Social Enterprise parenting magazine! Since giving up being a business analyst when juggling travel, work and kids proved too complicated, she founded KiddyCharts so she could be with her kids, and use those grey cells at the same time. KiddyCharts has reach of over 1.1million across social and the site. The blog works with big family brands (including travel) to help promote their services, as well as offering free resources to parents of kids under 10. It gives 51%+ profits to Reverence for Life, who fund a number of important initiatives in Africa, including bringing running water and basic equipment to a school in Tanzania. Helen has worked as a digital marketing consultant (IDM qualified) with various organisations, including Channel Mum, Truprint, Talk to Mums, and Micro Scooters. She loves to be creative in the brand campaigns she works on. Get in touch TODAY!

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