Emotional Regulation Activities for Kids: Fun Ways to Name and Calm Big Feelings

About this tool

Emotional regulation is the ability to notice a feeling, understand it, and respond to it in a manageable way rather than being swept away by it. It is one of the strongest predictors of how children fare in school, friendships, and later life, and it is a skill, which means it can be taught and practiced. Children are not born able to calm themselves. The brain region that manages strong emotion keeps developing into the mid-twenties, so what looks like willful misbehavior is often a young nervous system that is genuinely overwhelmed.

Kids learn to regulate through co-regulation first: a calm adult helps them settle, again and again, until they can do it themselves. The activities below build the pieces of that skill. Some teach emotional literacy, the simple but powerful ability to name what you feel, which research links to calmer responses. Others teach the body-based tools that bring an activated nervous system back down, such as slow breathing, movement, and sensory grounding.

The key is to practice when everyone is calm. A child in full meltdown cannot learn a new skill, just as none of us can study during a fire alarm. By playing these as games during peaceful moments, you build the pathways your child can reach for later. Over weeks and months, you will see the gap between feeling and reaction widen, which is exactly what growing self-control looks like.

Go at your child's pace and keep it light. Praise effort, not just success. The goal is not a child who never gets upset, which is neither possible nor healthy, but a child who is slowly learning what to do with big feelings when they come.

James Gross, whose process model of emotion regulation underlies much of this research, distinguishes between managing a feeling before it fully arrives and managing it once it has already shown up, which is what most of these body-based tools do. Dan Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson describe a related idea in child-friendly language as naming a feeling to tame it: putting words to what you feel engages the thinking brain and helps settle the emotional one.

There is no score to track here, so look for small, specific signs of change rather than a sudden transformation: a child who used to go straight from calm to a full meltdown pausing for even a few seconds to say 'I'm mad', or reaching for a balloon breath without being prompted. It helps to notice which specific activities your child gravitates toward, since kids often adopt one or two calming tools as their own rather than using the whole list evenly.

If outbursts are frequent, intense, involve hurting themselves or others, or seem out of step with what other children the same age typically handle, that is worth a conversation with a pediatrician or a licensed child therapist rather than something to work through with activities alone. You can start by browsing child therapists through the Psychology.com therapist directory.

Reviewed by Michael Callans, MSW
Reviewed the activities for developmental accuracy and fidelity to emotion-regulation research.

References

1. Siegel DJ, Bryson TP. The Whole-Brain Child. Delacorte Press; 2011.
2. Gross JJ. Emotion regulation: current status and future prospects. Psychol Inq. 2015;26(1):1-26.
3. Center on the Developing Child. Building the brain's air traffic control system. Harvard University; 2011.

Emotional Regulation Activities for Kids FAQ