Create Your Own Calm

Create Your Own Calm is a fun activity book that aims to help kids aged 6-12 learn how to manage their feelings and stop them being overwhelming.

It focuses on what children CAN do about the things that worry and concern them rather than dwelling on those things they can’t control. This approach leads to children feeling empowered and reduces their anxiety as a result.

Create your own calm contains 50 activities form yoga to belly breathing, earth day celebrations to how to feel calm at school.

It helps kids calm themselves down, have calmer relationships and to put a little more calm out into the world.

Below are a couple of exercises to strengthen a child’s resolve that they can make an impact rather than feeling despairing about the environment.

Make a ‘can do’ collage

When it comes to the environment it is so easy to feel overwhelmed by the world so we need to encourage kids to stake stock of those things they can control and action them. Making a huge collage of words and images and ideas of positive actions that kids can put into place can be hugely inspiring and a great prompt. What could they include in their collage?

• a recycling symbol
• a pickup Litter sign
• water bottle
• a bamboo toothbrush
• a switch turned off
• someone wearing a jumper rather than putting the heater on
• a protest sign
• a letter to an MP about lack of recycling bins

This could be a whole class project and a HUGE collage could be created filled with awesome ideas that kids can put into practice

Challenge yourself

A simple activity Becky encourages kids to do is to …

Write a list of everything positive and respectful they have done for the environment and give themselves a mark out of 10. Then make a new list the next day and see if they can beat their own score.

Being environmentally aware and active can be fun.

Child psychologist Steve Biddulph says that being involved in activism has real mental health benefits, it helps kids turn ‘feelings of despair and helplessness into a feeling of empowerment.’

Research indicates that young people involved in taking action and speaking up in regard to causes they believe report greater levels of happiness and fulfilment than kids who don’t.

So kids really can make a difference and doing so will help them feel more powerful and help develop more robust mental health.

Becky Goddard-Hill is a children’s therapist and wellbeing author. She blogs at Emotionally Healthy Kids  and her previous book in include the best-selling Create Your Own Happy  (also for 6-12’s) and Be Happy Be You – a happiness boosting book for teens

Create Your Own Calm is available from Amazon