The Huge Bag of Worries

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To help your child open up and discuss their emotions, you can start by asking your children how they are feeling; are they angry, sad, happy, scared or worried? You can then identify what might be making them feel this way. Reinforce the idea that it’s okay for your child to feel like this and that we all experience different emotions. By validating their feelings, it helps to build trust between you and your child. Or you may have come across slight variations that use different types of containers like jars. Those would be your Worry Jars, Feelings Jars, or Anxiety Jars. Art supplies like googly eyes and pipe cleaners if your child would like to make the box into a character. Knowledge is power. Understanding our worries means we can decide on an appropriate course of action, or simply share it with others and know that we are not alone. This is one of the key principles of cognitive behavioral therapy. A simple but effective variation on the worry box is the worry journal, which encourages children to record their worries and anxieties as they come up daily. This approach creates a more structured system to deal with anxious feelings.

Each of them has its own pros and cons, they may require certain skill sets and work in different contexts. This worry bag activity is a great one to use with your class to help them think about and discuss their emotions. It can be used as a morning starter activity to set them up for their day, or even as a standalone lesson alongside this Emotions PowerPoint.

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Older children will also benefit from using a worry box to make sense of what’s on their mind, and this will help prevent rumination. There’s something about physically writing or drawing your thoughts that helps is process them in a much more helpful way, than if they stay in our heads. As parents we need to recognise when they have taken on an adult worry. We need to remove this burden from them. For example, we can say: “this is something that I am dealing with, so you don’t have to”. If you are looking for mindfulness crafts to do some work with your kids or students this can be a great project.

Aim to stay flexible, attentive and responsive to the needs of your child. Explore different alternatives, discuss their pros and cons, and work together to find the approach that best supports their emotional wellbeing. Summary Should you look at what your child writes? Technically, no. The box is meant to be a safe place where the child can write down anything and not have it “discovered.” Instead, you could set up a worry time when your child can discuss her worries with you. Worry time is also a form of containment because it restricts the time the child can dwell on her worries with an adult. You can set up the time specially for the child, say from 4:00 to 4:20 every afternoon. If at 4:20 your child is not through discussing her worries, ask her to write down the worries and put them into the worry box. Tell her that she can take them out to discuss tomorrow at the same time. Children will feel more in control (and have fun) if they are the ones to make their own container to hold their worries. You can make a worry box out of any kind of container, such as a tissue box, a chip container or a tin can. This worry box is designed to look similar to the big green Worry Monster in the author’s book. The difference between a worry box and a Worry Monster is that the worry box holds your worries for you (a good thing) and the Worry Monster takes the worries in so he can grow bigger and scare you more (not so good).There are numerous ways people have found to contain worries. It is often a matter of naming the worry and then putting the worry somewhere in time and space. Some of the most successful methods include journal writing, drawing. imagining shrinking the worry, setting up a specific "worry time" and using a worry box. In my professional work, I used all of these techniques, both together and separately. I often combined the worry box with worry time, which is described below. How to make a worry box Park feelings or emotions that they may not be able to cope with at the present moment until they are ready to deal with them.

You can learn to manage your mind effectively to minimise stress and anxiety. You do not need to let your worries control or define you. Place a dab of glue on the top of the box. Place one of the curled pipe cleaners on top. Continue to make a cluster of curled pipe cleaner “hair” on top of the box. As well as this worry bag activity, there are lots of other ways you can help your children to think and talk about their worries and emotions. We've got these brilliant teacher-made resources for you to try:In this article I will guide you through the process of creating a worry box with your child, and share how this coping mechanism can significantly reduce anxiety levels. As you explore this powerful tool, your child will learn that learning to manage their your worries effectively leads to increased wellbeing and a healthier state of mind. What is a Worry Box? This is not easy to do when you feel worried about something. Asking them to stop thinking about it may even make them more focused on the worries. They may feel it is an “unfinished business” or they may worry they will forget about it.

You can also help your children to relieve anxiety and stress with this Homemade Stress Ball activity.

It tells the story of a little girl who carries around a huge bag filled with worries. (‘The metaphor is little monsters).