A book can help with
For the one who wriggles, bounces and climbs the furniture from dawn onwards.
Some children come with more energy than the day can absorb. They fidget through meals, wriggle through stories, and are up and off before you’ve finished a sentence. It can look like naughtiness from the outside and it usually isn’t; it’s simply a body that needs to move.
Books help by showing that energy as a good thing needing somewhere to go, rather than a fault to be sat on. The best of them are physical enough to join in with, which suits a child who takes in more when their body is involved.
Here’s what I’d reach for. Find your child’s age and start there.
Books to move to
For the youngest, a book they can act out beats one they must sit still for.
Each animal does something and asks whether the child can do it too, so the whole book is stomping, bending and clapping. It puts the wriggling to work rather than fighting it. Perfect for a toddler who cannot sit through a story.
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A bright, energetic run through a day of hopping, flapping and finally sleeping, with plenty to join in with physically. Good for getting the last of the wiggles out before bed. Bold and joyful.
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All that energy
Now they may be being asked to sit still at school. These treat their energy as a strength.
Abigail can’t stop fidgeting and giggling in class until a teacher spots her love of singing and gives all that energy somewhere to go. It never labels her, and it ends on what she can do. Warm and gently funny.
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Tiddler cannot keep still, so his mum sends him out to swim it off, which is a solution most parents will recognise. He gets into a scrape with a big fish before he comes home, so there is a small jolt of danger in the middle. What stays with children is that the wriggling is never treated as naughtiness.
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The times you have to be still
There are occasions when a child simply has to stay put: assembly, a long meal, a service, a waiting room, the back of a car on a motorway. Being still is a skill rather than a character trait, and what follows treats it as something that can be practised rather than something to be told off for.
Four pebbles, each one standing for something, and a short practice a child does with them held in their hands. Because it is something to do rather than something to stop doing, it works for a child who cannot simply be told to settle down. Small enough to carry, which means it comes with you to the service or the waiting room.
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Seventy-five games rather than instructions, from the author whose frog exercises are used in schools across Europe. Yoga, cut-out cards, meditation stories, things to make and stick. It is the companion to her main book and the one a restless child will actually pick up and use.
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A very proper English butler turns up on the doorstep on the first morning of term and sets about teaching Carter cricket, which turns out to be a long lesson in paying attention to what is in front of you. Funny on nearly every page and quietly serious underneath. Carter’s younger brother died and his father has gone, so it carries real weight.
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Learning to focus
Around eleven a child works out that concentration is worth something, and that it is built rather than simply possessed. What follows hands that over to characters learning it the hard way, in a crowded flat and at a chessboard.
Lawrence is twelve, has been expelled for fighting, and ends up at a rec centre where a man called Mr Dennis runs a chess club. Chess turns out to be the first thing that has ever rewarded him for thinking before he moves. Four starred reviews, and it deals with racism, poverty and a father in prison, so it is a serious book.
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Ana María has to nail one piano piece to win a scholarship, and is trying to practise it in a flat containing three sisters, two parents, a constant stream of neighbours and a baby on the way. The whole book is the business of concentrating when nothing around you will let you. Warm and very funny with it.
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Something to do together
A page of quick movement breaks for the moments when sitting still has become impossible. I’m making it now, and it will live here soon.
Physical activity genuinely helps children concentrate afterwards, which is why movement breaks are now standard practice in a great many classrooms. A child who has run about first sits still better than one who has been told to settle.
So build in movement before anything that needs sitting, choose books they can join in with physically, and try not to treat wriggling as misbehaviour.
These pages are written for the grown-ups looking after a child: parents, teachers and carers. A good book can sit beside a worried child, though it never stands in for a real conversation, or for proper support when something feels too big to carry alone.