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Sapling MINDS

Developing Your Child’s Coping Skills



Resilient children are better able to handle life’s ups and downs. One way to develop their resilience is by teaching them healthy strategies for coping with emotions. Every person is different and unique, and it is important you honour the authenticity of your child by acknowledging that some coping skills will work better for them than others. It is important that as parents, you teach a range of skills so that your child can learn what will work for them.


As you begin teaching different types of healthy coping strategies, you may notice an alignment of these categories with your child’s natural learning style. For example, if they are a kinaesthetic learner they may naturally lean towards active or relaxing coping strategies where they are physically using and moving their body as a coping skill, or if they are an auditory learner, they may prefer to use a guided meditation or listen to an audiobook.


Healthy coping skills can be categorised into 5 types of strategies; active, relaxing, creative, social, and mindset. Let's take a look at each of those in more detail...


  1. Active coping skills involve engaging in positive physical activity to move the body to release stress and tension. Such as going for a walk/run, doing some yoga, dancing to a favourite song, playing soccer with friends/family, or even simply the act of squeezing a stress ball.

  2. Relaxing coping skills involve mindfulness activities focused on calming the nervous system. Such as deep breathing, taking a bath, reading a book, practicing a guided meditation, or hugging a beloved soft toy.

  3. Creative coping skills involve tapping into creative outlets to process and release emotion. Such as painting, playing an instrument, building Lego, singing, or making up a new game.

  4. Social coping skills involve engaging with others and connecting with our community to process and calm emotions. Such as playing a game with family, FaceTiming with a friend, playing with a pet, visiting the grandparents, or reading a book together.

  5. Mindset coping skills involve strategies to help shift the point of focus towards something positive and psychologically supportive. Such as focusing on something that you are grateful for, looking at pictures of a happy memory and focusing on the feelings felt when that picture was being taken, practicing self-compassion by reminding yourself it is okay to make mistakes and you are doing your best, practicing a grounding exercise (example below), or practicing self-awareness (example below).


Grounding exercise example: use your five senses to bring you into the present moment through a “5-4-3-2-1” exercise. To do this focus on and name, 5 things you can see around you, then 4 things you can touch around you, then 3 things you can hear around you, then 2 things you can smell around you, and finally 1 thing you can taste. Complete each step in full before moving onto the next. You may wish to consider whether you encourage your child to count off each of these steps on their fingers. With continual practice, this will help to create a neural shortcut for grounding their nervous system later in life, as the simple gesture of moving their fingers in a counting-like style will then be a grounding trigger.


Self-awareness exercise example: recognise and name the emotion currently being felt, listen without judgement to what it is telling you, understand the impact this is having on your thoughts and behaviours, and then let it go because you have learnt what the emotion was teaching you from that experience. This will help your child to learn the range of emotions they experience, and how these emotions show up in their daily life.



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