APPS FOR KIDS WITH ANXIETY
The Calm App– Calm is the #1 app for Sleep, Meditation, and Relaxation, offering guided meditations, Sleep Stories, breathing programs, stretching exercises, and relaxing music.
Calm is recommended by top psychologists, therapists, and mental health experts. There is a free version, as well as a yearly subscription offering much more access to their programs. Teachers can subscribe to a free membership for their classroom.
This is our family’s go-to app for regulating breathing during times of anxiety, stories to assist at bedtime, and options when we need a few moments of peace. We used the free version for several months before purchasing the yearly subscription for the past two years.
Happy Color– Open your new coloring book, find different unique coloring pages with animals, unicorns, mandalas and many more. Color and recolor your favorite pictures. Rediscover the simple relaxation and joy of coloring.
This color by number app offers plenty of free coloring book options for mindless coloring. You can purchase an upgrade for more scenes to color if you choose.
My daughter uses this while listening to Audible stories, during needed breaks at school, and other times where she finds her mind leading to unhappy thoughts or in stressful situations.
Positive Penguins– Positive Penguins is an award-winning, top-ranked, fun educational app developed for children to help them understand why they feel the way they do. It helps them challenge their negative thinking. The app aims to help children understand their feelings come from their own thoughts, not the situations. Often the anxiety and stress we feel comes from not real threats, but stories we make up in our heads.
The four positive penguins take you on a journey to help you understand that feelings arise from your thinking and if you challenge your negative thoughts successfully you may be able to see things in a more realistic and even optimistic way. The cost is $.99
We tried this game before adding it to this post. While both of my children are too old for the game, it really does a wonderful job of helping a child work through their thoughts in a fun way. The penguins are quite cute and the app is easy to use.
Dreamy Kid– The DreamyKid meditation app offers meditation, guided visualization and affirmations curated just for children & teens. It uses proven techniques that teach your kids methods to guide them towards a happier life through mindfulness. The app is free to download but then you purchase specific meditation programs for $3.99 each. Examples of meditations are bedwetting, freedom from ADHD, and coping with divorce.
Stop, Breathe, and Think– Stop, Breathe, and Think is a daily mindfulness app that also prompts you to input how you’re feeling. Select your mood when you open the app and it will suggest the meditations, yoga sequences, or acupressure that could serve you best in that moment, from deep breathing exercises to body scans to visualizations.
The app is free to download, allowing you to explore the features offered, but you must pay in order to use the features. You can pay monthly, yearly, or for a lifetime membership. Teachers can receive a free membership for their classroom.
Stop, Breathe, and Think Kids– (Ages 5-10) As parents, we want to raise our kids to be able to handle whatever comes their way. Whether they need to mellow out before bed, develop positive relationships or simply have a peaceful moment, Stop, Breathe & Think Kids offers children a fun and easy way to identify and process their emotions.
From counting breaths to friendly wishes or frog jumps, each activity brings fun rewards to keep them engaged. The app is free to download, allowing you to explore the features offered, but you must pay in order to use the features. You can pay monthly, yearly, or for a lifetime membership. Teachers can receive a free membership for their classroom.
Smiling Mind– Smiling Mind is designed to help people with the pressure, stress, and challenges of daily life. This app has a fantastic section on Mindfulness in the Classroom and is suited for kids ages 7-18. Smiling Mind is developed by psychologists and educators to help bring balance to people’s lives. This app is free.
Emotionary– Emotionary guides users through five primary emotions to find the right category of feeling, with all definitions pared back to the essentials and displayed so they can be easily compared. It increases the user’s emotional vocabulary and allows the user to create a drawn “selfie” to match these emotions. This app is free
Anxiety Helper– Anxiety Helper provides information about depression, anxiety, and panic attacks, as well as resources related to other mental health conditions. It also offers interactive tools, designed to help users cope with mental illness on a day-to-day basis.
The app’s “guided vent” feature invites users to talk through their feelings to experience emotional release. This app is free
Mindshift– MindShift uses scientifically proven strategies based on Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) to help you learn to relax and be mindful, develop more effective ways of thinking, and use active steps to take charge of your anxiety. This app is free.
Relax Melodies – This app allows you to select sounds and melodies that your child will like, combine them and adjust the volume of each sound to create a mix. The app also has meditations specially designed for sleep. The app is free to download but then it does cost to enjoy most of the features.
Super Stretch Yoga– Super Stretch is an educational yoga tool to use and teach the fun of physical activity and breathing to children. They will use the skills of self-awareness, self-esteem, and self-regulation that they learn from this app as a foundation for the rest of their lives. It is easy to follow and engaging for children and teens. This app is free.
https://goodbyeanxietyhellojoy.com/apps-for-kids-with-anxiety/
Worry Watch
Worry Watch is an app available for teens, their parents, and even adults who suffer from anxiety. This app serves as a way to self-monitor and keep track of one's anxious thoughts, whether generalized to all situations or anticipatory about a specific situation. It's unique in that it contains a series of thought options from a pre-fixed menu, and a visual graph that depicts the different reasons why a person has been anxious. Then, the teen or adult is able to assess whether the actual anxious thought was as bad as the actual outcome. This app works as a therapist on the go and can be helpful to the teen or adult who is willing to identify thoughts and review them. This is also helpful to share with your Cognitive Behavioral Therapist as this gives him/her the opportunity to review worries throughout the day that sometimes cannot be expressed on a weekly basis.
This is a powerful tool that can be used by your teen when he/she is ready to identify his/her thoughts and examine them. It requires follow through multiple times a day, day after day. Keeping a log of thoughts makes one's internal world tangible, less ambiguous and less powerful.
Cost: $1.99
Requires iOS 7.1 or later
Compatible with iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch
Developed by Akilan Rajendran
Nature Melody
Use this app to fall asleep to nature sounds, and to wake up to something other than a loud beeping or vibrating sound that jolts you out of your sleep! It can be used by children and adolescents who need help unwinding during the day (e.g. after school) or while trying to fall asleep at night. You can also use this app if you are looking for soft music to help you stay relaxed while you are studying, or on a car ride.
It has alarm settings with different nature sounds so you have control over what sound your teen or child will wake up to. The different choices include: crickets chirping, rooster crowing, birds singing, ocean waves, rain and thunder, and blizzard wind. Unlike radio stations, this app creates music that is geared towards relaxation and calming.
This is a useful app for any child or teen of any age. It helps to create background noise for the anxious child who is hyper-vigilant, or the child with ADHD who needs background noise to stay focused. It also helps with children who are restless or experience high anxiety right before bed. For the child who can't self calm, this is a nice way to focus on something other than one's thoughts while falling asleep, studying, or just listening for fun (and relaxation).
Cost: Free
Requires iOS 7.1 or later
Compatible with iPad, iPhone and iPod touch
Developed by Lina Elsayed
HelloMind
Here is an app for children and adolescents. You can choose from ten different 30-minute guided hypnosis sessions that come with a focus, such as stress, low self-esteem, restlessness, and emotional eating. A child or adolescent can listen to the hypnosis session in an effort to negate negative thoughts related to a particular stressor within the moment, as opposed to sitting with the anxiety and resulting low mood all day long. It's discrete and attempts to transform negative thoughts into positive ones.
Once again, this app serves as a therapist on the go. For your older child and adolescent, this is a positive way to gain control over thoughts and mood without too much effort. It can be accessed at school, home, in the car, on the plane – wherever.
When the child or adolescent has completed all ten hypnosis sessions, you can access a booster session. You can gain a subscription for one month or one year.
10 sessions - $8.99
10 sessions and Boosters - $12.99
All treatments and Boosters - $119.99
Requires iOS 8.0 or later
Compatible with iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch
Developed by HelloMind APS
Acupressure – Heal Yourself
Wouldn't it be great if we could teach our kids to use pressure or massage on certain parts of their body so that they can gain relief from anxiety or stress? This app provides illustrations on how to massage and use acupressure to help relieve pain, feelings of nervousness, or worry. By pressing down on acupressure points, tension can be released from the body and promote a quieter stomach or a feeling of calmness and wellness, for example. This helps our children to build awareness of how he/she is feeling, and then to have access to a way to calm his/her body down. It can be used by children (alongside an adult) or adolescents.
Acupressure is the art of using our fingers to press on particular points of the surface of our skin in order to initiate the body's natural ability to cure itself. This happens when these points are pressed upon and they release muscular tension, increase blood circulation, which promotes healing or relief. The act of acupressure is easy, discrete, and can be done at any time (e.g. before entering the school building, in bed, in the car, before a test, social situations, etc).
This app provides 90 acupressure points to relieve headaches, relieve pain, help relieve an upset stomach, or promote relaxation.
Cost: $1.99
Compatible with iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, and Android
Requires iOS 5.1.1 or later
Developed by Alexander Mokrushin
Mindfulness for Children: Meditation for Kids
As we try to practice more mindfulness ourselves, we understand the benefits of quieting the mind and body so that it can rest and replenish for the next day. Mindfulness helps us to be in touch with what is on our mind and how we feel so that less is being pushed down or away. This app is easy to use and offers sleep meditations for children by using understandable language and visualizations to help children let go of their worries and allow their body to rest. As we know, when our children are better rested, they are more resilient and patient. They feel less over-stimulated and better able to focus on their school day and activities. Calmer children make for a calmer home for siblings and parents alike. It can be used with children as young as 5.
Cost: $4.99
Requires IOS 6.0 or later
Compatible with iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch
Developed by Jannik Holgersen
Kids Yogaverse: I Am Love
This app gives you yoga on the go without searching for the remote for your DVD or having to find the nearest class and match it up to your schedule and availability. Yogaverse is geared towards children, ages 4-8, so the moves are easy to follow but yet relaxing and effectively engage your child's entire body in a way that releases negativity and anxiety. This app keeps kids engaged by flying through Egypt on a magic yoga mat and using 13 yoga moves and breathing exercises to help kids stretch, calm, and open their heart.
Cost: $3.99
Requires iOS 6.0 or later
Compatible with iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, and Android
Developed by Gramercy Consultants
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