Therapy Worksheets for Kids and Teens: Tools for the Adults Who Use Them

About this tool

Therapy worksheets for kids are structured activities that an adult uses to teach a child a specific skill: naming a feeling, calming the body, catching a worry, planning what to do when angry. They are the child and adolescent versions of the tools therapists give adults, adapted so a six year old can draw the answer and a fourteen year old does not feel talked down to. This collection gathers every kids and teens tool on Psychology.com in one place. One rule runs through all of them, and it is worth stating plainly before the list: every page here is written for the adult, the parent, carer, teacher or clinician who will teach or offer the activity. Nothing on this site is addressed to a child or a teenager. Many of the activities are optional and adult-led, so a child may draw, point, post a worry or answer a parent's question; none is a test, a score or a form a minor completes alone.

That rule is a site policy: Psychology.com writes for adults and does not address children or teenagers. The practical reason it works is that the adult is the one who has to understand the skill well enough to teach it, adapt it and know when it is not enough. A good kids tool is a script for a conversation between an adult and a child, with the activity as the excuse. So each page explains the idea in adult terms, gives the activity, and says how to run it with a child of a given age, what usually goes wrong, and when to call in a professional.

The collection covers five areas. Feelings tools, the feelings wheel, the emotion wheel and emotion faces, build the vocabulary that every other skill depends on. Body and calm tools, belly breathing, progressive muscle relaxation, mindfulness activities and calm-down strategies, give a child something to do with a surging body. Coping and worry tools, coping skills for kids and for teens, worry activities and anger management, turn one feeling into a plan. Skill-building tools, CBT for kids, DBT for teens, social skills activities and art therapy for teens, adapt established therapy methods for younger ages. And strengths tools, gratitude activities, self-esteem activities and journal prompts for both ages, work on what is going right.

The methods behind these tools have real support. Cognitive behavioral therapy for childhood anxiety, in programs such as Philip Kendall's Coping Cat, is among the best-tested child treatments. A 2020 Cochrane review found it clearly better than a waiting list or no treatment, with about half of children free of their main anxiety diagnosis afterwards against under a fifth on the waiting list; against usual care the evidence was low quality and did not show a clear difference in remission of the main anxiety diagnosis, though it may increase remission of anxiety disorders overall. Dialectical behavior therapy for adolescents, adapted by Jill Rathus and Alec Miller, has trial support for self-harm and emotional dysregulation in teens. Social and emotional learning programs that teach feeling vocabulary and calming skills in schools show small but consistent gains in behavior and wellbeing. What the evidence does not show is that a worksheet on its own does any of this. The worksheet is the handout from a program; the program is the adult, the repetition and the relationship. Keep that in proportion.

A few practices make any of these tools work better. Teach the skill when the child is calm, never first in a crisis. Do it yourself alongside them; a parent who takes belly breaths gets a child who takes belly breaths. Keep it short and stop while it is still going well. Use the child's own words for feelings and levels. Treat answers as information, not as a grade, and never use a tool as a punishment or as a condition of something the child wants. For teens, hand over more of the control: let them choose the tool, keep what they write private unless safety is at stake, and expect eye-rolling to coexist with learning.

The common mistakes are predictable across all of them. Handing the sheet over and walking away. Using a tool only when the child is already upset, so it becomes a sign of trouble. Expecting a seven year old to reflect like an adult. Reading a child's answers as a diagnosis. Running a worry activity or an exposure step at a pace that suits the adult's anxiety rather than the child's. And treating any of this as a substitute for assessment when something is clearly wrong.

If a child says they do not want to be alive, talks about ending their life, or discloses that someone is hurting them, that is urgent and separate from anything on this page. Do not wait to see whether it lasts. Stay with the child if their immediate safety is uncertain, and start getting professional or crisis help now rather than waiting for a convenient moment; in the US, call or text 988. If there is immediate danger or an urgent medical need, call your local emergency number. A disclosure of harm needs a safeguarding response, not a worksheet. Short of that, see a professional when a child's distress has lasted more than a few weeks, is getting worse, is showing up at school and at home both, or comes with a sharp change in eating, sleeping or friendships.

Reviewed by Michael Callans, MSW
Curated the collection and reviewed the framing of every linked page as written for the adult, never addressed to a child or teen.

References

1. Kendall PC, Hedtke KA. Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy for Anxious Children: Therapist Manual. 3rd ed. Workbook Publishing; 2006.
2. James AC, Reardon T, Soler A, James G, Creswell C. Cognitive behavioural therapy for anxiety disorders in children and adolescents. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews. 2020;(11):CD013162.
3. Rathus JH, Miller AL. DBT Skills Manual for Adolescents. Guilford Press; 2015.
4. Weisz JR, Kazdin AE, eds. Evidence-Based Psychotherapies for Children and Adolescents. 3rd ed. Guilford Press; 2017.
5. Durlak JA, Weissberg RP, Dymnicki AB, Taylor RD, Schellinger KB. The impact of enhancing students' social and emotional learning: a meta-analysis of school-based universal interventions. Child Development. 2011;82(1):405-432.

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