Big feelings, what next

What this pack teaches

The feeling is never what is being sorted. Every card here is about the action a minute later, and whether it left the situation easier or harder to be in.

A feeling is not a decision, and telling a child to feel differently does not work. What is a decision is the thing that comes after — where you go, what you say, whose tower you knock over. Separating the two gives a child something they can change without being asked to stop feeling it, and it makes the limit sayable: the anger is fine, the hitting is not.

• Say what you need out loud.
• Go somewhere quieter until it passes.
• Ask for a minute on your own.
• Tell a grown-up what happened.
• Squeeze a cushion instead of a person.

How to use this

• ·Sit next to your child rather than opposite them. This works best as a thing you do together, not a thing you set them.
• ·Read the speech bubbles aloud if that helps. Nothing here needs to be read independently.
• ·Talk about the picture before the buttons. “What's happening here?” is often more useful than the sorting itself.
• ·Five situations is a session. Stopping after two is a fine session too.

Practising away from the screen

• ·Name the feeling and the action separately, out loud: “you were furious, and the cup went on the floor.” Two facts, joined by an and rather than a because.
• ·Agree a place to go before anybody needs it — a bedroom, the back step, under the table. A place that has to be found mid-storm is not a place.
• ·Talk about it later, not during. An hour afterwards, over something else entirely, is when a child can think about what they did next.

Things you can say in the moment

• “You are allowed to be that angry. The throwing has to stop.”
• “Do you want to go to your room for a bit? I will still be here.”
• “Tell me what you need. I can wait.”
• “That was a big one. Nothing is broken and nobody is in trouble.”

What not to push

• ·Crying, yelling into a pillow, going quiet, rocking, flapping and needing to be completely alone are never the problem. None of them is on the harder mat, in any pack.
• ·Nothing here asks a child to be calmer than they are. The cards separate the feeling from what happens next, and only the second half is ever sorted.
• ·Big feelings are not a failure of anything. A child who has just had one has not done something wrong, and this pack is not a debrief on their worst afternoon.

If this pack is hard today

Do this one on a good day, a long way from the last hard one. If your child hears it as being told about their own afternoon, close it — there are eleven other packs and none of them is about them.