The Self-Compassion Workbook for Kids: Fun Mindfulness Activities to Build Emotional Strength and Make Kindness Your Superpower

Fun, engaging, hands-on activities to help kids ages 5-9 be kind to themselves and others, and build the emotional strength and resilience needed to thrive!

Children today face many challenges; and if you are a parent, teacher, or a professional working with kids, you may be seeking answers on how to help children thrive in a world filled with uncertainty, adversity, and the detrimental effects of social media and screen time overload. There are tools you can use to help kids build confidence and resilience, and cope effectively with difficult situations. This workbook is packed with a variety of hands-on practices to help children thrive--with kindness toward themselves and others.

In this fun and engaging workbook, the cofounder of the Mindful Self-Compassion for Teens (MSC-T) program offers essential self-compassion and mindfulness skills to help kids build emotional strength and resilience. Kids will find simple, age-appropriate practices based in loving-kindness and gratitude to self-soothe, reduce stress, and respond to their own emotional needs. They’ll also learn to make kindness their ＂superpower,＂ quiet their inner bully, and protect and befriend themselves.

Activities in the book are designed to facilitate experiential learning, and include:

• Mindfulness meditations
• Reflective journaling
• Hands-on mindful movement activities
• Arts and crafts activities

Self-compassion and emotional resilience are cornerstones of mental health, and research shows that teaching these skills to children when they are young can have lasting, positive effects--well into adulthood. With this workbook as a guide, kids will learn to be a better friend to themselves and others, and thrive in a stress-filled world.

Lorraine M. Hobbs, MA, is founding director of the family programs at the University of California, San Diego Center for Mindfulness. Hobbs is cocreator of the Mindful Self-Compassion for Teens (MSC-T) program, and codeveloper of the MSC-T teacher training pathway. She is a certified teacher of MSC, Compassion Cultivation Training (CCT) and MBSR. She is also codeveloper of A Friend in Me: A Self-Compassion Program for Kids and Their Caregivers, and the Compassion in Parenting Program (CiP). Hobbs is coauthor of the book, Teaching Self-Compassion to Teens (Guilford Press 2022).

Amy C. Balentine, PhD, has practiced for more than twenty years as a clinical psychologist. She is founder and director of the Memphis Center for Mindful Living, LLC. She is also a mindfulness teacher at University of California, San Diego’s Center for Mindfulness and codeveloper of A Friend in Me: A Self-Compassion program for Kids and their Caregivers. She is founder and director of the Memphis Center for Mindful Living, LLC, where she is a qualified teacher of mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR). She is past president of the Memphis Area Psychological Association.

Foreword writer Kristin Neff, PhD, is a pioneer in the field of self-compassion research, conducting the first empirical studies on self-compassion more than fifteen years ago. In addition to writing numerous academic articles and book chapters on the topic, she is author of Self-Compassion. In conjunction with her colleague Christopher Germer, she developed an empirically supported, eight-week training program called Mindful Self-Compassion, and offers workshops on self-compassion worldwide.