Anxiety awareness and recognising feelings are at the centre of Beating Your Worries, a child-friendly booklet for exploring worries, fear and nervous thoughts. It uses simple explanations, emotion words and drawing prompts to help children start talking about anxiety in a way that feels manageable.
Helping a child put worrying feelings into words can be difficult, especially when anxiety feels like a jumble of thoughts and body sensations. Beating Your Worries gives children, parents, carers and school staff a gentle way to begin that conversation, using clear language about worry, fear, nervousness and feeling overwhelmed.
The booklet explains what anxiety is and reassures children that many children and adults experience anxious feelings. It describes how worries can take over when thoughts are hard to get out of your mind, then introduces the fight or flight response, adrenaline, faster breathing, a racing heart, shakiness and sweating in simple child-appropriate terms.
A feelings activity invites children to look at different emotion faces, including happy, worried, excited, hurt, scared, bored, angry, confident, ill, chilled, frustrated, thoughtful, silly and sad. Blank spaces allow them to add their own words, making it useful for emotional literacy work, wellbeing sessions, pastoral support and one-to-one conversations.
Creative prompts ask children to draw what their anxiety looks like, perhaps as a monster, gremlin, blob or cloud, and then draw the opposite: happiness and calm. These activities may suit primary-aged children and younger teens who benefit from visual, practical anxiety worksheets at home, in school or during counselling-style support.
