In everyday caregiving, knowing what to say and do after a frightening event can make trauma support feel more manageable for parents, carers and frontline helpers. The handbook is written for adults supporting children affected by war, displacement, refugee camp life or other overwhelming experiences, with a practical focus on helping kids and children feel safer in their bodies.
The early sections explain how trauma may show up in a child, what trauma is, and how adults can help without needing to be specialist therapists. There is a clear step-by-step trauma first aid approach, including checking the adult’s own body responses, assessing the situation, noticing sensations, slowing down, validating physical reactions, encouraging rest and helping the child make sense of what happened.
Practical activities are a major part of the handbook, making it useful for home use, parent support, social work sessions, refugee support work, family work and child wellbeing groups. Activities listed include grounding and centring exercises, simple sports activities, competence-building tasks, make-believe play, arts and crafts, silly exercises to relax the brain, physical activities for boundaries and healthy defensive responses, and calming activities.
Later content covers separation, loss and grief, with sections on helping a child to grieve, steps that support grief resolution, emotional support and grief groups for children. Anger is also included, making the booklet relevant for adults searching for trauma recovery activities for children, child PTSD support, emotional regulation tools, bereavement support for kids, and printable trauma-informed parenting resources.
The material is especially suited to parents, foster carers, humanitarian workers, social workers, counsellors and school staff supporting children who have experienced frightening or destabilising events. It was created by Češi pro Sýrii and draws on work by Peter A. Levine and Maggie Kline.
