What If Coping Strategies for Kids Don't Work? Helping Kids Learn What Helps
Helping children approach coping strategies with curiosity, flexibility, and practice.
This article is part of the Steady Steps™ series, exploring practical ways families can help children build emotional skills through everyday experiences.
“But We Tried That…”
Maybe you've practiced taking slow breaths with your child.
Or breaking something difficult into smaller pieces.
Talking about a feeling.
Asking for help.
Taking a pause.
So, you have tried some or all of these. Then the difficult moment arrives.
Your child tries the strategy—and it doesn't seem to help.
Or maybe they simply look at you and say:
“That doesn't work.”
As parents, it can be tempting to immediately search for the next strategy. But finding effective coping strategies for kids isn't always about adding another tool. Sometimes it starts with noticing what happened with the one we just tried.
Okay. What should we try instead?
But there may be another useful question to ask first:
What can we learn from what just happened?
That small shift—from Did it work? to What did we notice?—can help children gradually learn more about themselves, their emotions, and the kinds of support that may be useful in different situations.
When Coping Strategies for Kids
Don't Work as Expected
We sometimes treat emotional regulation strategies as if they have only two possible outcomes:
It worked.
Or:
It didn't work.
Real life is usually more complicated.
A strategy might help a little without making the difficult feeling disappear.
It might be easier to use before emotions become especially intense.
The step might have been too large.
A child might need support remembering what to do.
Or a strategy that feels useful for one child simply may not be particularly useful for another.
None of those observations necessarily means the child—or the strategy—failed.
They give us information.
This kind of flexibility connects with the broader ACT concept of psychological flexibility: responding to what is actually happening and adjusting our actions rather than rigidly following the same response regardless of context.
A 2024 systematic review and meta-analysis of 67 unique ACT studies found that ACT interventions increased several dimensions of psychological flexibility and reduced several dimensions of inflexibility. Changes in these processes were also associated with reductions in psychological distress, supporting their role as ACT treatment mechanisms (Macri & Rogge, 2024).
Much of that evidence comes from adult populations, so it shouldn't be treated as proof that a particular strategy will work in the same way for an individual child.
The goal isn't to lower the standard until everything counts as successful.
It's to become more precise about what actually happened.
Start With Something Small Enough to Try
Imagine your child feels overwhelmed by homework.
The goal could easily become:
“Get your homework done.”
But that's a lot to experiment with at once.
Instead, we might make the first action smaller:
Open the math folder.
Or:
Find the reading assignment.
Or:
Let's read the first direction together.
Then we notice.
Did starting become a little easier?
Was that first step still too large?
Did your child need something different?
This reflects the Shrink idea within Steady Steps™: not because children should never face difficult things, but because sometimes a smaller action gives them a workable place to begin.
Notice Before Immediately Changing the Plan
Now imagine your child has practiced slow breathing.
During a difficult moment, they tell you:
“Breathing doesn't help when I'm mad.”
Adults have two easy directions they can go.
One is:
“It could. You just need to practice.”
The other is:
“Okay. Forget breathing. Let's find something else.”
There is a third option:
Get curious.
What did your child notice?
Did they expect the anger to disappear?
Did anything change, even slightly?
Was breathing difficult to remember once the anger was already intense?
Might it be more useful earlier?
Would practicing during calmer moments make it easier to access later?
Or perhaps slow breathing simply isn't especially useful for this child in this situation.
Noticing isn't the same as judging.
We aren't grading the child.
And we aren't grading the strategy.
We're gathering information.
Present-moment awareness is one component of psychological flexibility, and ACT research increasingly examines flexibility-related processes as possible mechanisms of change (Macri & Rogge, 2024).
Research involving children and adolescents is smaller and less established. A systematic review by Harris and Samuel (2020) identified promising findings for ACT interventions with young people, including improvements in psychological flexibility in many of the included studies, while emphasizing that more research is needed to understand the role of flexibility in those outcomes.
For families, we don't need to turn this research into a clinical exercise.
We can simply practice noticing what happened with our child in this moment before deciding what should happen next.
Let Children Participate in the Experiment
Children can also help figure out what works. It is for them, after all.
That doesn't mean parents stop providing guidance.
We can offer choices.
Help make an idea safer or more manageable.
Suggest possibilities when a child feels stuck.
But when a child's idea is reasonable, we don't always need to replace it with the strategy we think would work better.
You might say:
“I might have chosen something different, but let's try your idea. We can always try another way later.”
That turns the child from the recipient of a coping strategy into a participant in learning about their own experience.
Over time, the question becomes less:
“What does Mom or Dad tell me to do when I'm upset?”
and more:
“What am I noticing—and what might I try?”
That's a much more transferable skill.
Feelings Don't Have to Disappear
for a Strategy to Have Helped
This may be the most important distinction.
We can unintentionally judge coping strategies by one outcome:
Did the difficult feeling go away?
But emotional skills don't work by removing emotions.
A child may still feel nervous—and walk into practice.
Still feel frustrated—and ask for help.
Still notice a harsh thought—and continue working.
Still feel disappointed—and try one small step again.
From an ACT perspective, the goal isn't primarily to reduce or eliminate uncomfortable thoughts and feelings. Psychological flexibility includes making room for internal experiences while continuing to take actions connected to what matters.
Research on ACT mechanisms supports this broader model. Macri and Rogge's (2024) meta-analysis found that changes in processes including acceptance, present-moment awareness, defusion, and committed action were associated with changes in psychological distress across ACT studies.
Again, research specifically involving young people is more limited. Harris and Samuel's (2020) systematic review described ACT as promising for child and adolescent mental health while calling for additional research. A subsequent systematic review and meta-analysis found that ACT-based interventions produced a small reduction in stress among children, adolescents, and young adults compared with control conditions, while noting limitations including small samples, heterogeneous studies, methodological concerns, and possible publication bias (Binder et al., 2024).
So instead of asking only:
“Did the feeling go away?”
we can also ask:
“What were you able to do while the feeling was there?”
That is a very different measure of progress.
Try It Together: My Steady Steps Plan™
If you'd like to practice this approach with your child, I've created a free parent–child printable:
My Steady Steps Plan™ — FREE Parent–Child Printable | Ages 5–10
Choose one hard thing together and work through the Steady Steps™ process:
Notice — What's happening?
Name — What thoughts or feelings might be showing up?
Make Room — Can those feelings be here without needing to make them disappear first?
Shrink — Can we make the challenge smaller?
Try — What's one small step we can take?
Then treat the plan as an experiment.
Try it.
Notice what happens.
Record what you learn.
And decide what you might want to keep, change, or try next time.
Download the My Steady Steps Plan™
No email signup is required.
Keep What Helps. Change What Doesn't.
After trying something, families don't need a complicated evaluation.
A few simple questions can be enough:
What seemed to help?
What did we learn?
What might we try next time?
Sometimes the answer will be:
Let's keep practicing this.
Sometimes:
Let's make the step smaller.
And sometimes:
Let's try something different.
That's not failure.
That's flexibility.
One Steady Step at a Time
Children don't need us to always know the perfect strategy.
And they don't need every coping strategy they try to work perfectly.
We can help them develop something potentially more useful: a way of approaching hard experiences with curiosity.
Try something manageable.
Notice what happens.
Learn from it.
Adjust.
Try again.
Trying → noticing → learning → adjusting.
One steady step at a time. 🐾
Continue Exploring Steady Steps™
For families who want to keep practicing these ideas together, the Steady Steps™ page brings together the complete collection of articles, free tools, and parent–child resources.
Families looking for a more structured way to practice the full five-step process can also explore the Steady Steps™ parent–child workbook for ages 5–10. And while you are on that page, you can also download the free My Steady Steps Plan™ there as a simple place to begin.
Frequently Asked Questions
What if coping strategies don't work for my child?
A coping strategy doesn't have to eliminate a feeling to be useful. Start by noticing what actually happened. Did it help a little? Was it difficult to remember? Was the situation already too intense? Was the strategy simply not a good fit? What you learn can help guide what you try next.
Should I keep making my child practice a coping skill that isn't helping?
Practice can make unfamiliar skills easier to access, but repetition alone doesn't guarantee that a particular strategy will be useful for every child or situation. Stay curious about what your child experiences and adjust when appropriate.
Why do coping skills sometimes work when children are calm but not when they're upset?
Using a skill in a calm practice situation and accessing it during a difficult real-life moment are different challenges. Practicing during calmer moments can build familiarity, while real-life use gives children opportunities to learn when, where, and how a skill may help.
How can I help my child figure out which emotional regulation strategies work?
Try one manageable strategy at a time and then reflect together. Ask what your child noticed, what seemed helpful, what was difficult, and what they might change next time. When appropriate, let your child participate in choosing the next experiment.
Does an emotional regulation strategy have to calm my child down to be successful?
No. Calming down may sometimes happen, but it doesn't have to be the only measure of success. A child might still feel nervous, angry, disappointed, or frustrated while successfully asking for help, making a task smaller, staying present, or taking one meaningful step.
References
Binder, F., Mehl, R., Resch, F., Kaess, M., & Koenig, J. (2024). Interventions based on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy for stress reduction in children and adolescents: A systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials. Psychopathology, 57(3), 202–218. https://doi.org/10.1159/000535048
Harris, E., & Samuel, V. (2020). Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: A systematic literature review of prevention and intervention programs for mental health difficulties in children and young people. Journal of Cognitive Psychotherapy, 34(4), 280–305. https://doi.org/10.1891/JCPSY-D-20-00001
Macri, J. A., & Rogge, R. D. (2024). Examining domains of psychological flexibility and inflexibility as treatment mechanisms in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: A comprehensive systematic and meta-analytic review. Clinical Psychology Review, 110, 102432. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2024.102432
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