Taming Your Thoughts: A CBT Strategy to Help Kids Control Their Thinking | CBT Tool

Taming Your Thoughts is a Fun, Simple and Interactive Activity that Helps to Empower Kids and Youth to Take Control of Their Thoughts. This 14 page resource is in Powerpoint format, in 8x11.5 inches, and so can be easily printed. It is best suited for approximately Grade 3 to 8, but can be used across all elementary and junior high levels.

Children, just like adults, can be hard on themselves when it comes to how they think about what they do or say. This is particularly true for kids with mental health issues or behavioural disorders who may be especially down on themselves. They can get stuck in negative thinking patterns that can make emotions seem overwhelming, and contribute to social/emotional difficulties, such as depression, anxiety, and social isolation.

These negative thinking patterns are also referred to as cognitive distortions, cognitive errors or thinking mistakes – and they are very common, but often times are unrealistic, and need taming.

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), teaches us to recognize and catch thinking errors that may be making us feel negative about ourselves, and provides skills to change negative, debilitating thoughts into positive, empowering thoughts. CBT can be learned easily with enough practice, and can help us and the children we raise and work with, to live healthier and happier lives.

The following exercise is a simple strategy to empower kids to identify, challenge and control their thinking. The strategy is preceded by clear examples, followed by concrete and simple to follow instructions and templates that can be used across home and school settings.

The General Overview:

1. Child writes down their current negative thoughts in the thought bubbles provided

2. Then, they use the subsequent page to write down their positive replacement thoughts

3. They then cut out the positive replacement thoughts and glue the upper tab to the top portion of the negative thoughts (it will work like a flap).

4. In the end, child will have negative thoughts, with flaps over top, containing the positive replacement thoughts

5. They can use this tool to practice replacing negative thinking with positive thinking!

Have fun with it! And, as usual, please feel free to leave a comment/feedback/suggestion to earn credits towards future purchases, and to allow me to continue to provide practical resources to my fellow educators. Thank you!