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How to create a Christmas Calm Down Kit

1:24 pm 28 April 2021 Luis Guerrero 0 Comments

Christmas can be challenging for kiddos, especially for our more sensitive little people – toddlers and preschoolers, kids who experience anxiety, those who struggle with emotion regulation, and those with sensory processing difficulties and special needs. Christmas can be hugely overwhelming for many of our little ones.

And, of course, I created the Mindfulness for Children to help you set up a calming, quiet space for your kids and to teach them how to self-regulate when they experience big emotions. But Christmas, with its often over-the-top sensory experiences and extra social expectations and obligations, can bring unique challenges. And I’m frequently asked – what can I do when we’re not in the house and can’t use our calm down space? How do I help my child then?

So I’ve put together something special to help your kids (and you!) manage some of those BIG feelings that come up more often at Christmas. Mindfulness for Children. This kit is designed to support your child to process their big emotions during the holiday season. It contains Christmas-themed activities and resources that your child will love to use, AND it’s a bit smaller than the original calm-down kit because it’s designed to be more portable.

What to include in a Christmas Mindfulness for Children

Inside your Mindful Little Christmas Mindfulness for Children, you’ll find various printable resources to help your child understand and manage their feelings. All printables listed below are included in your kit, as well as full instructions and recipes for making the sensory tools. Below is the list of items I recommend you keep in your kit (this is what we currently have in our kit, too!). You’ll also find this list inside your equipment and a few more ideas you and your child might find helpful.

Printable Resources:

  • Gingerbread man feeling cards
  • Christmas-themed calm-down cards
  • Christmas-themed mindful breathing exercises
  • Christmas mindful colouring pages

Items to eat and drink:

  • Candy canes or peppermints to suck on
  • Hot chocolate sachets
  • Peppermint gum

Items from around your house:

  • Christmas teddy to cuddle
  • Christmas book
  • Christmas music
  • Coloured pencils, crayons or markers

Sensory Tools:

  • Gingerbread playdough
  • Christmas stress ball
  • Christmas calm down jar

How to Use Your Mindfulness for Children

This Mindfulness for Children is designed to go with you wherever you go! Print off your feelings and calm down cards, cut them out (laminate them if you’d like), and pop them on a binder ring. You might also want to keep a small box or bag in your car or handbag to pop your breathing boards, play dough, stress ball and/or calm down jar into. Then, when your child feels overwhelmed or needs a bit of a break, you have some tools to help them out.

To introduce your Christmas Mindfulness for Children to your child, explain that the tools can be used when they feel worried, scared, anxious or overwhelmed. I recommend talking to them about how they might feel when this happens. What will they notice in their body? How will they behave when they start to feel anxious or nervous? What might other people see? This will help them develop self-awareness to recognise the need to use their tools. In the meantime, it will be your job to realise that they are becoming dysregulated and suggest they use their calm-down kit, so it will be helpful for you to have think about what their early warning signs might be.

Remember, a dysregulated child has no access to the thinking part of their brain. Once they are in fight or flight mode, they are simply trying to remain safe, so this is not the time to introduce new tools or talk logic to them. Be sure to submit the means to them when they are calm and practice them repeatedly until they feel comfortable and understand how to use them!

Helping your child to use their Mindfulness for Children

You’ve noticed your child starting to become dysregulated. Now, what do you do?

  1. Acknowledge how they’re feeling and help them label their emotions. You can use the feelings cards here if they are not too distressed: “I hear your voice getting louder. Are you feeling angry? Can you show me which card matches how you’re feeling?” If your child is already quite dysregulated, go straight to validation.
  2. Validate their emotions: “Your cousin knocked down your block tower after you spent so long building it. Ugh, that’s so frustrating!”
  3. Offer comfort and containment so they can feel safe. “Do you need a hug? Let’s find a quiet place to sit together so I can help you.”
  4. Use your calm-down cards and tools to help your child regulate. “Would you like to squeeze your play dough or do some gingerbread man breathing?” Stay with them while they put their strategies into action.
  5. Once your child feels calm, you might like to problem-solve with them. If your child was too distressed to use their feelings card earlier, you might want to use them now: “Can you use them to show me how you felt? What can you do next time you’re feeling angry/frustrated/disappointed?”

Above all else, it’s important to remember that self-regulation is a developmental skill that needs to be learned over time. We cannot teach kids to regulate before they are developmentally ready any more than we can teach them how to walk when they are three months old. All kids will reach this milestone in their own time. Our job is to support them and their nervous system as they learn. We do this by providing them with the tools and resources they need and the connection they need from us. Kids learn to self-regulate by experiencing co-regulation over and over again. When we repeatedly lend our children our calm, we help them find their own.

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