A book can help with
For the child who winds up and can’t wind back down again.
Some children go up like a firework and take an age to come back down. This isn’t about teaching a child to feel less or to keep a lid on things. The feeling needs to come out; what a child needs alongside it is a way to settle their body afterwards, so they aren’t left churned up for hours. Being told to calm down has never once worked on anybody.
What does work is giving a child something to actually do: a breath to take, a picture to hold in mind, a routine that signals the winding down. Books deliver those in a way that sticks, because the child learns them at a calm moment rather than in the middle of a storm. Read them when nothing’s wrong, then use them when it is.
Here’s what I’d reach for. Find your child’s age and start there.
Slowing down
For the very youngest, calm is something you do together and physically, rather than anything they understand.
A much-loved character used to introduce the simplest ideas of pausing, breathing and noticing how you feel. Because the caterpillar is already familiar, a toddler settles into it easily. Short, soothing, and good as part of a wind-down.
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Thirty short breathing and mindfulness exercises with names children love, like hot chocolate breathing and sleepy sloth, each taking barely a minute. There’s no preparation needed and you can dip in anywhere, which is exactly what you want with a small child. A genuinely useful book to keep to hand.
or on Bookshop.org
A breath they can use
Now they can learn a technique and remember it. These give a child something concrete to reach for.
An interactive book that asks the child to blow onto the page and watch the colours change, turning breathing into something magical rather than a chore. It gives a young child a tool they can use anywhere, and they rather enjoy practising it. Lovely as part of a bedtime routine.
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A short, practical guide to mindfulness for children, written for parents to use alongside them, with simple exercises and audio to follow. The frog image, sitting still and breathing while everything goes on around you, is one children remember. Probably the best-known introduction to the subject for families.
or on Bookshop.org
Managing themselves
Older children can begin to notice their own warning signs and head things off before they boil over.
When Anh loses his temper, his grandfather sends him to sit with his anger, which appears as a furry red character he can talk to and sit beside until it calms. It shows a child how to be with a big feeling rather than be swept off by it, and there’s no shame in it anywhere. A thoughtful, unusual book.
or on Bookshop.org
This teaches a child to notice the physical signals that come before a big feeling, the hot face, the tight chest, the fast breathing, so they can catch it early. Practical and calm, with simple activities to try together. Useful for the child who’s always taken by surprise by their own temper.
or on Bookshop.org
Something to actually do
By this age a child wants a technique rather than a story, and preferably one nobody else has to see them using. Each of these hands over practical things to try alone.
Written straight to the child, with breathing exercises and meditations for particular situations: not sleeping, an exam tomorrow, an argument, a headache. It explains what stress does to a body before it asks anybody to sit still. Illustrated throughout, so it never reads like homework.
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Nicola Morgan on what a brain actually needs, covering sleep, stress, screens and why practising a thing changes what you are capable of. The calming part is understanding what is going on, which is usually what an older child is missing. Practical, and never preachy.
or on Bookshop.org
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Something to do together
A page for making your own calm-down plan: three things that help, somewhere quiet to go, and a breath to try first. I’m making it now, and it will live here soon.
Nobody learns to calm down in the middle of losing it, and a young child genuinely can’t do it alone. Developmental psychologists call it co-regulation: a small child borrows an adult’s steadiness because the part of their own brain that manages it is still years from being built. Your calm is doing the work long before their own does.
So practise these when everything is fine rather than in the thick of it, do the breathing alongside them rather than instructing it, and let the feeling be spoken before you reach for the calming. A technique used to shut a child up teaches something quite different from one used to help them recover.
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.