Mindfulness activities for kids to reduce stress

Amy Malloy
Amy Malloy
A child and parent laying on a carpet staring at eachother and smiling

How can we help children (and ourselves) deal with turbulent situations?

As humans, we are programmed to position ourselves according to the constants around us: people, structures and boundaries. When those constants shift, it can be unsettling for adults and children.

Sometimes we find ourselves in unprecedented situations, and we each have our own approach to managing things. If you feel confused and without direction because of a turbulent situation, please know that that is okay.

We’ll look today at why that is, to help us understand ourselves a little more and why these simple mindfulness activities can help us navigate it.

What causes social stress?

There may be many reasons for feeling stressed in life, but during turbulent times in society, it is often due to not feeling safe.

Something in our environment is alerting our survival instinct. This makes our brains produce stress hormones, which get us ready to fight the threat, run from it, or freeze until it’s gone away.

The threat might be to our physical or even social survival – and the two are linked. Things can feel even scarier when we also feel isolated from our social group, which keeps us protected from that threat.

Human beings are social by nature. We live and work in communities, we connect through love and empathy and we protect each other. There’s truth to the saying“there’s safety in numbers”.

But it’s not just about safety. We also define ourselves by comparing ourselves to others and working out what we are not.

Research has found that we identify deeply with our role in society and the ‘pack’ to which we belong. This holds deep ties with our sense of safety, contentment and self-esteem. If the boundaries by which we define and position ourselves have shifted or continue to shift, we will feel unsafe, threatened and therefore stressed.

Are children affected by social stress in the same way?

If we then apply this to children, the constants to whom they look for security are the adults in their life. If the adults are behaving differently, the children will feel a shift and feel unsafe and stressed too. If they don’t have their friends alongside them for social positioning, this too can lead to them feeling confused and uncertain.

Here are some key ways we can help:

Communicating and listening

Children may often lack the language to express what they are feeling, or even to recognize it themselves. Therefore, we must offer ways to help them make sense of the world around them, to help them feel safe and to help express their concerns.

Communication provides the necessary social interaction and models for them on how to handle the new situation. It firms up their boundaries, and provides a safe space where they feel listened to and acknowledged and this, in turn, helps diffuse their stress.

The activity below is a lovely way to invite children to express any worry they might be feeling, mindfully and with support – and give them something to do with their feelings. It also has the benefit of helping them breathe fully and slowly, which will calm down their nervous system.

Breath activity: Worry bubbles

  1. Sit together and invite your child to put their palms together.
  2. Invite them to take a big breath in. As they breathe in, they can draw their palms further and further apart, spreading their fingers as they imagine blowing up a big bubble between their hands.
  3. Invite them to whisper a worry into the bubble.
  4. Invite them to blow the breath out nice and slowly. As they breathe out, they can imagine blowing the bubble (and the worry) away with a big sigh.
  5. Twinkle the fingers back down to the lap, and start again, either with the same worry or a new one

Helping them find a safety anchor inside themselves

By helping children focus on breathing, we can teach them that even if things feel wobbly around them, their breath is always there. The act of focusing on the breath also helps settle the fight or flight branch of their nervous system into a calmer, more balanced state.

Breath Activity: Counting breaths

  1. Invite your child to sit with you.
  2. Invite them to place their hands on their tummy and breathe in slowly so they push into their hands, counting slowly up to four.
  3. As they breathe out, invite them to count up to six, as they slowly empty the belly and their hands lower back down.
  4. Continue until they feel calmer. You can do this every morning or evening to help sustain balance. With younger children, they might like a teddy on their tummy to push up and down!

These two activities can be lovely daily practices to try and provide some safety and structure to your child or students’ mental health right now. They are also enjoyable activities to try for yourself – you may like to increase the in and out count of the breath a little bit for an adult breath.

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    How English conversation works

    By Richard Cleeve

    English language teachers everywhere spend time and energy helping students practice their conversation skills. Some may ask whether conversation in English can actually be taught. And – if it can – what the rules might be.

    To explore these questions, we spoke to world-renowned . He is an Honorary Professor of Linguistics at the University of Bangor and has written more than 120 books on the subject.

    What makes a good conversation?

    “It’s very important that we put this everyday use of language under the microscope,” he says. He highlights three critical facets of conservation that we should bring into focus:

    • Fluency
    • Intelligibility
    • Appropriateness

    But all in all, he says that people should walk away from a conversation feeling like they’ve had a good chat.

    “For the most part, people want that kind of mutual respect, mutual opportunity, and have some sort of shared topic about which they feel comfortable – and these are the basics I think.”

    The rules of conversation

    There are plenty of ways you can teach learners to engage in a successful conversation – including how to speak informally, use intonation, and provide feedback. So let’s take a look at some of the key areas to focus on:

    1) Appropriateness

    Fluency and intelligibility are commonly covered in English language classes. But appropriateness can be more complicated to teach. When preparing to teach conversational appropriateness, we can look at it through two different lenses: subject matter and style:

    2) Subject matter

    “What subject matter is appropriate to use to get a conversation off the ground? There are cultural differences here,” he says. The weather is often a good icebreaker, since everyone is affected by it. The key is to find a common topic that all participants can understand and engage with.

    3) Style

    Teachers can also teach students about conversational style, focusing on how to make conversations more relaxed in English.

    There are “several areas of vocabulary and grammar – and pronunciation too, intonation for example – as well as body language, in which the informality of a conversation is expressed through quite traditional means,” says David. One example he offers is teaching students how to use contracted verb forms.

    4) Simultaneous feedback

    This is what makes a conversation tick. When we talk with someone, we let them know we’re listening by giving them feedback. We say things like “really” or “huh” and use body language like facial expressions and gestures.

    Of course, these feedback noises and expressions can be taught. But they won’t necessarily be new to students. English learners do the same when speaking their own language, anyway.

    Keep in mind though, that when it comes to speaking online on video conferencing platforms, it’s not easy to give this type of simultaneous feedback. People’s microphones might be on mute or there might be a delay, which makes reacting in conversations awkward. So, says David, this means online conversations become much more like monologues.

    5) Uptalk and accents

    Uptalk is when a person declares something in a sentence, but raises their intonation at the end. For English learners, it might sound like someone is asking a question.

    Here’s an example:

    • “I live in Holyhead” said in a flat tone – this is a statement.
    • “I live in Holyhead” said using uptalk – you are stating you live here, but recognize that someone else might not know where it is.

    Now, should teachers teach uptalk? David says yes. For one, it’s fashionable to speak this way – and it can be confusing for English learners if they don’t understand why it’s being used in a conversation.

    “The other thing is that we are dealing here with a genuine change in the language. One of the biggest problems for all language teachers is to keep up to date with language changes. And language change can be very fast and is at the moment,” he says.

    When it comes to accents, David is a fan. “It’s like being in a garden of flowers. Enjoy all the linguistic flowers,” he says, “That’s the beauty of language, its diversity”.