Child Anger Management Worksheets (Free Download)
Download free child anger management worksheets
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Everyone sometimes struggles to learn how to manage powerful feelings like anger, and this can be especially true for children. Learning how to understand how they feel, and how to successfully talk about those emotions, is something that takes practice and guidance.
Anger management skills for kids
If you work with children or other young people in your practice who need help managing their anger, there are different techniques you can work with them on. You may need to adapt some of these concepts depending on how old your clients are, but the basic ideas should be applicable across age groups.
One way to help children manage their anger better is to help them recognize and identify their emotions. Especially for younger children, if they’re having an intense emotional experience that they don’t recognize, or that they don’t have language to explain, that can make the situation worse. Giving kids of all ages the tools and language they need to successfully talk about their emotions—both internally and with other people in their lives—can go a long way to helping them manage their anger later.
Other soft skills, like having healthy coping skills, the ability to problem-solve, and critical thinking skills can also help them work through moments when they feel angry. Of course, these skills are helpful and often necessary in other areas of life as well, but if you can help your clients build up these strengths, they might be able to work through difficult moments without getting as angry as they might have before.
Similarly, there are other activities and techniques like breathing exercises and grounding techniques that can be really helpful in moments of intense emotion. You can teach your clients various activities like anchor breathing or how to start a mindfulness practice that they can put to use in their daily lives when they’re not in session that can help them get through angry moments.
All of these skills and activities can be helpful for anyone experiencing anger. Children in particular may need extra support to know how to make the best use of them—which is where caregivers and therapists come in.
5 free child anger management worksheets
These free child anger management worksheets can also be modified to be clinically appropriate for your clients depending on how old they are and what concerns you’re working on together. They can be useful as a starting point, and most of them can be worked on as homework for your clients that you then talk through together in session.
1. “What is anger?” worksheet
The “what is anger?” worksheet is a good starting point to help your clients fully understand what’s happening when they feel anger. You can have them fill out this worksheet on their own as homework—or depending on how old your client is—you can help them fill it out in session.
Have them draw a picture (or write out, if they don’t want to draw) of what they think they look like when they’re feeling angry. Or, you can also simply ask them to draw what they think anger looks like more generally. (This may also be a useful adaptation for clinician who use deconstructive techniques focused on separating the person from their emotional experience.)
Then, have them write down some things they do or say when they feel angry. You can help them identify some of these things if they have a hard time pinpointing exact actions or things they say.
You can also extend this worksheet to include a section where you discuss some things they can do to help them feel better when they’re feeling angry.
2. “Building emotional vocabulary list” worksheet
This “building anger vocabulary” worksheet will help your clients find the right words to describe the emotions they’re feeling. Sometimes children have a difficult time recognizing and putting language to their emotions, especially when they’re feeling anger.
You can use the list of emotion words already in this worksheet, or you can remove them and work together with your client to list out emotions they feel on a regular basis.
If you want to expand the worksheet, you can create a list of scenarios—or use scenarios from the client’s life—where one of the feelings words on your list would be an appropriate emotional response. Then, encourage your client to match the situation with the corresponding emotion word, and discuss why they picked that emotion for that situation.
3. “Anger warning signs” worksheet
The “anger warning signs” worksheet is a good way to help your clients recognize when they’re starting to feel mad, so they can then implement some calming and coping skills.
Use this worksheet to help your client recognize what happens in their mind and body when they start to feel mad. You can work on filling this out in tandem with your client in session, and then give it to them to take home as a reminder. The warning signs, feelings, and physical sensations in this worksheet can be examples, and may need to be adjusted depending on the age of your client.
4. “Angry, calm, or both?” worksheet
This worksheet helps illustrate the difference between feeling anger and feeling calm, and can help them also identify ways to move from the first emotion to the second. You can use this list of emotions and actions, and you can also swap them out for things your client really feels and does in each of those states. You also may need to swap some out depending on the age of your client.
5. “Anger thermometer” worksheet
The “anger thermometer” worksheet is a good visual aid for young clients to help them measure the extent of the emotion they’re feeling. The green part of the thermometer at the bottom represents when they’re frustrated or only a little bit mad, and then as you move up the thermometer into the red zones, the emotion gets bigger.
Talk about each section of the thermometer with your client. What does it feel like for them when they are only a little bit mad, or when they feel like they’re in the “red zone”? What actions do they usually take in each of those emotional states? (You and your clients can use the anger warning signs or your vocabulary worksheets to help put language to this worksheet.)
Then, discuss what coping skills they could use to calm down for each stage of the thermometer. Some examples might include taking deep breaths, taking a break from an activity, or talking it out with someone like a parent or caregiver.
You can put the worksheets in this free bundle into use in your practice right away, or you can use them as a starting point to brainstorm ideas and figure out what works best for your practice and your clients. Sign up for emails from SimplePractice to stay up-to-day on other free resources and worksheet ideas.
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