What can we do to calm down nervous children?It’s not always easy to take care of our children, especially at times when their emotions are “agitated” and they can’t control it.
When our children are nervous, we see them suffer and want to do everything we can to calm their negative feelings as quickly as possible.
- However.
- Sometimes we need outside help to be able to reassure them.
- In this article you will find 3 effective psychological techniques to calm nervous children.
We’ll list some preliminary considerations so you can choose the technique that can help you at any time:
One of the most common problems for nervous children with their uncontrolled emotions is that they see everything as very powerful and frightening, so the first of our psychological techniques to calm nervous children is to help them dramatize their anxiety.
How the technique works is very simple: just ask your child to find a funny name for the unpleasant emotions he feels, it’s important that the name is as threatening as possible.
Once you’ve found a name you think is appropriate, all your child needs to do is eliminate those emotions. For example, if you decide your emotions would be called “Pepe,” your child might say something like this:
Leave me alone, Pepe!
“Pepe, stop making me feel that way?!”
When you give your feelings a funny name and speak aloud to them, your child can minimize how they feel and calm down quickly.
When someone talks about your problems, one of our first impulses is usually to help you, but in the case of our children, as they are even less rational than adults, applying logic to explain that everything will work out well doesn’t always work as well as it should.
Therefore, with our children trying to show that nothing bad is going to happen can increase their anxiety, instead try to listen carefully and show them all your affection, for example, through physical contact, with kisses and hugs. if your child feels understood and protected, his nervousness will decrease almost immediately.
Several studies show that it’s possible to associate an object with a certain emotion, for example, if your child has a special stuffed animal, or a safety accessory (such as a scarf or bracelet), enjoy it!
Recent research indicates that sleeping with a stuffed animal helps children overcome nighttime fears. This same principle can be applied in many other situations: if your child is afraid on the first day of school, why not make something calm him down?it’s small enough, the other kids won’t even notice it.
This technique will be even more effective if you tell your child what your intention is and ask him to choose an object to accompany him in his bad times, in this way the child will become more involved in the process and the positive feelings will be more intense.