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A Self-Compassion Break for Kids (and Us)

by | Jan 30, 2026 | Mindfulness, Parenting, Self-Compassion | 0 comments

A resource that can help when things go wrong

Hello friends,

The other night I was driving out of town to pick up my daughter, and I was feeling upset. Events outside of my control were weighing heavily on my mind, so I turned on soothing music. But I knew I really needed to give myself compassion.

I opened my guided meditations page, and I decided to listen to the “Three for Me” self-compassion break for kids that I had recorded with my daughter a few years ago. It was just what I needed. Listening to her little voice reminded me to notice how my body felt and to soothe myself. I highly recommend listening to the self-compassion break for kids included in this blog. I’ll briefly describe the practice below, originally developed by Kristin Neff, and how I’ve adapted it for kids using hand gestures. I’ll also share a kid-friendly visual from volume 2 of my workbook where Flame the dragon practices the three steps of self-compassion.

“3 for Me”—A Kid-Friendly Self-Compassion Break

A self-compassion break helps us hold our suffering with kindness and connection. It has three parts, so when I teach it to kids, I call it “Three for Me.” Each part has a hand gesture that helps kids connect with the practice.

Step 1. Mindfulness, Noticing That This Is Hard

The hand gesture for this is putting your hands on your head. You could say to yourself, “This is hard,” or “I’m really struggling with this.” Sometimes kids just like to say, “Ugh!” (There are more variations for kids in the guided audio practice.)

Step 2. Remembering We’re Not Alone

We remind ourselves that we are having a human experience, and others might feel like us. The hand gesture for this is extending your arms out in front of you with your palms up. Some kids like to say, “I’m not alone.” Other kids like to say “It’s okay to feel like this.” (Permission to be human.)

Step 3. Offering Ourselves Kindness

You can give yourself a hug or put your hands on your heart, or do another soothing gesture. You could also say comforting words, like “I’m here for you,” or “I care about you.” Kids often like to remind themselves that it’s going to be okay, or that they can do hard things.

In the Mindfulness and Self-Compassion Workbook for Kids, Volume 2, I have kids circle the words that they would like to use for each part of the self-compassion break. (This helps kids consider what would be helpful.)

Using Visuals and Hand Gestures to Support Kids

In my workbook for kids, I have kids watch Flame the dragon practice the three parts of self-compassion for Flame’s big struggle–not being able to fly. You can see Flame try out the self-compassion break with the hand gestures in the illustration below.

Illustration of Flame the dragon practicing the Three for Me self-compassion break for kids, showing the three hand gestures: hands on head, arms out, and hands on heart.

Kids often connect Sunny’s reminder at the end of the page: “Remember, you are always good inside.” When things go wrong, sometimes these are the words that kids need to hear.

A Guided Self-Compassion Break for Kids You Can Use Anytime

After listening to the self-compassion break in my car, I felt more grounded. I was still upset, but I felt loved and held. You can listen to the guided practice below whenever you need, or download it to your device.

Self-Compassion break for kids: "3 for me" Practice.

https://jamielynntatera.com/self-compassion-break-for-kids/​

The link also has a video of my daughter Anjali and me doing the self-compassion break together. If you’re introducing the practice to a child, you might want to start with the visual of Flame the dragon or ask if they’d like to watch the video of Anjali and me. For kids, it often works best for them to watch someone else do the practice first, and then try it when they are ready. Many parents and kids share that doing the hand gestures during a moment of struggle helps them remember the three parts of self-compassion.

You are not alone

If you’re having a hard time with some of the stuff going on in the world, please know that you are not alone. You are here, showing up with love and doing the best you can to help kids do the same. This matters. Your presence matters, and I’m glad that you are here.

Wishing you love, compassion, and self-compassion,

Jamie Lynn

Related resources:

Helping Kids Navigate Fear

by | Jan 23, 2026 | Mindfulness, Parenting, Self-Compassion | 0 comments

When is fear a warning, and when is it a false alarm?

Hello friends,

I continue to feel grateful for the conversations unfolding around the Mindfulness and Self-Compassion Workbook for Kids series—conversations rooted in the real joys and struggles children face as they grow. My writing here will keep returning to those everyday challenges, and to the playful, practical tools that help build resilience over time.

I want to share a story about a child I’ll call Amy. I’ve written about Amy before as we explored motivation and what’s happening beneath children’s resistance. Amy was struggling with what appeared on the surface to be a lack of motivation to initiate social time with friends, but we discovered that more was happening. Under the surface of resistance, she felt “terrified” to reach out to friends and take the first step in making plans. (If you’d like to learn more about Amy’s discovery process, you can visit this blog.)

Two types of fear

When I work with kids, I like to start by helping them understand fear’s purpose: fear is built into the architecture of our brain to keep us safe. We do a playful imagining activity about being a wild giraffe (a simple way to help kids understand fear’s protective role), and then we begin to differentiate between the two types of fear.

Sometimes fear is pointing us toward an actual danger, and we want to pay a lot of attention to this kind of fear. We want to honor the message of fear when our intuition says a grown-up has bad intentions or a pathway home from school does not seem safe. Other times, fear is pointing us toward something that feels threatening, but doesn’t actually put us in danger. In the case of Amy, texting a friend was this second kind of fear, which I teach kids to call a “false alarm.” Our job as caregivers is to help kids recognize the difference and respond to each kind of fear differently. We want to appreciate and honor fear, AND we also want to be wise.

In Volume 2 of the Mindfulness and Self-Compassion Workbook for Kids, children learn to identify the “false alarm” kind of worry, as illustrated in this visual:

Worry alarm excerpt from the Mindfulness and Self-Compassion Workbook for Kids, Volume 2.

I then use a playful analogy to make it even clearer for kids to differentiate these two types of fear: a barking dog.

The Barking Dog Analogy

Have you ever seen a dog in a house barking furiously at the front window at every person that passes by? This dog thinks that the people passing by are a threat even though the dog is actually safe inside the house.

Here’s where I have kids create a picture of their barking dog:

Barking dog pictures-false alarm from Mindfulness and Self-Compassion Workbooks for Kids, Volume 2.

Amy was able to see clearly that her fear of texting friends to invite them to hang out was a “barking dog” kind of fear, not a real threat. Choosing the actual dog (she drew a chihuahua) was an important part of helping her become mindful of her fear in a playful and nonjudgmental way.

Next we began to explore how we could “soothe” the barking dog. Rather than trying to make the fear go away, we focused on helping Amy feel safer with the fear so she could build the capacity to face it. We used the resilience animals and applied the habits to the dog and ourselves.

Soothing the Worried Dog_Mindfulness and Self-Compassion Workbook for Kids

The above image from the workbook allows kids to choose their favorite strategies:

  • We can name what is happening (speak to the dog calmly).
  • We can notice our five senses, including sights and sounds and the bottoms of our feet (help the dog look around).
  • We can move our bodies. Exercising, stretching, or slowing down our breathing can help (take the dog for a walk).
  • We can offer ourselves kindness and remember that everyone feels this way sometimes (pet the dog).

Each idea corresponds with a resilience animal habit. If you’d like a refresher of the animal habits and an example of how to apply the resilience habits in real life, you might enjoy this article: https://jamielynntatera.com/2025/12/resilience-habits-for-worried-kids/

Oftentimes parents and other caregivers of children want to jump to action: get Amy to overcome her fears and text her friends. Over time, we can move toward the action phase, which is critical. But it’s not where we start. We begin with becoming mindful and befriending the space that we are in.

Thank you for being on this journey with me,

Jamie Lynn

What’s Under Resistance?

by | Jan 12, 2026 | Parenting, Resilience, Self-Compassion | 0 comments

Sometimes it’s fear. 

Hello friends!

In a recent reflection, I explored motivation for kids. Here, I’d like to explore a common saboteur of motivation—fear—and how it can show up for kids (and us) in surprising ways.

A story about Amy

(Note: Details about Amy and her mom have been altered to protect her family’s privacy.)

I have a client whose daughter, Amy, loves spending time with friends but is often passive when it comes to inviting her friends to hang out. Even though Amy would enjoy having a friend over after school or on a weekend, she doesn’t take the initiative to make it happen. Instead of inviting a friend to come over after school, she will curl up in a comfy chair in her living room and scroll on her phone instead.

Because her mom knows that it’s healthy for Amy to be social, her mom has historically taken the initiative when it comes to arranging playdates for Amy with friends. But now that Amy is in middle school, her mom has been trying to assertively shift the responsibility for social planning over to Amy.

As a two-week school break was approaching, it became clear to Amy’s mom that Amy was not going to have social time with friends without some sort of intervention. Ultimately Amy’s mom decided to assist with planning some friend time for Amy, but she also asked for my assistance so she could understand why Amy wasn’t taking the initiative herself.

Before this conversation, I had already introduced Amy and her mom to the idea that there are many different types of motivation, including wanting to want to do something, which we called Type W. (I explored Type W motivation in this reflection.) My conversation with Amy revealed another type of motivation: Type T for terrified.

Type T Motivation

Here’s what my conversation with Amy looked like:

Me: Do you want to spend time with your friends over break?

Amy: Yes, I want to hang out with my friends. But I don’t want to have to text my friends to ask them to come over.

Me: Do you want to want to invite your friends to spend time with you over break?

Amy: No. I don’t want to want to ask them to hang out. I want to spend time with them, but I don’t want to invite them.

Me: So you want time with your friends to just magically happen?

Amy: Yes.

Me: (Seeing if I could help her discover any tiny hidden motivation) Is there even a little part of you that wants to text your friends so that you can hang out with them?

Amy: No. No part of me wants to text my friends to invite them.

Me: What’s preventing you from wanting to text your friends?

Amy: I have type T motivation. I am terrified to text my friends to ask them to do something. (Type T for Terrified.)

I’ll summarize the rest of our conversation here: We had a lot of back and forth about whether she would be afraid to call a friend to ask them to do something, or if texting was worse. And what aspects made asking more or less scary. I remained curious and non-judgmental, seeking to understand what was going on inside of her. At first she maintained that no part of her was interested in making any social arrangements, but eventually, she thought that maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to ask a friend to hang out.

Anxious child sitting on a school bus

Understanding Fear and Avoidance

The above conversation barely scratched the surface of what might be happening beneath the level of consciousness for Amy. Often when kids resist doing something outside of their comfort zone, there are a couple of things happening: 1) fear and anxiety, and 2) a voice trying to “help” them avoid fear and anxiety. My next steps for Amy included helping her understand the nature of her fears, and also helping her to see the ways that avoidance showed up for her.

In this follow-up reflection, I return to Amy’s story and share playful tools that help kids tell the difference between real danger and “false alarm” fear. You can also find them in the Mindfulness and Self-Compassion Workbook for Kids, Volume 2. And for now, I invite you to be curious about what might be happening beneath the surface when you find it hard to motivate yourself or your child.

Wishing you and your kids love, belonging, curiosity, and freedom,

Jamie Lynn

P.S. Before working directly with fear, it can be helpful to build emotional awareness and connection. If your child has a hard time with big or uncomfortable feelings, I offer my Raising Resilient Kids: Helping Kids with Big Feelings Mini-Course as a free resource. Learn more about the mini-course here.

When Your Child Seems Unmotivated

by | Jan 5, 2026 | Mindfulness, Parenting, Self-Compassion | 0 comments

A reframe that can help parents support kids 

Hello friends,

The other day I heard myself telling my 13-year-old that she “lacked motivation” to do something productive over break. And actually, this conversation didn’t begin over break. Uh-oh, I thought to myself, This is not the voice I want my daughter to internalize.

I don’t want my 13-year-old to develop an inner narrative that she is lazy or unmotivated; I want her to have a positive inner voice. And when she is feeling unmotivated, I want her to be curious about how to help herself move forward rather than defining herself as an unmotivated person. And truthfully, she IS super motivated to play Minecraft, so it’s not that she lacks motivation to do anything…

Our conversation led to a playful exploration about the many types of motivation (we currently have discovered at least seven). Below you’ll see the beginning of our exploration.

Type A-1 Motivation: You want to do the right thing

Type A-1 motivation is when you are highly motivated to do things that are good for you (like eating healthy foods, exercising, working on goals, and meditating). I envy people that actually enjoy cooking healthy foods. I am not one of them. There are a few healthy habits (like my breathing practices) that I have done regularly enough that I happily engage in, but honestly, my daughters and I are not full of type A-1 motivation when it comes to making good choices. Luckily, feeling highly motivated to do the right thing is not the only type of motivation!

Type A-3 Motivation: You can creatively get yourself to engage in the healthy thing

Type A-3 motivation is where you can get yourself to do something good for yourself by doing a little mental or logistical gymnastics. (Yes, we skipped A-2, which is in between A-1 and A-3.) For example, I know that it’s good for me to lift weights during perimenopause, but I do NOT enjoy the thought of lifting weights. To compensate for my lack of A-1 motivation, I have built lifting weights into my weekly schedule. On certain days, I’m not allowed to come home from work until after I’ve stopped at the gym to lift. Often I sit in the gym parking lot for 15 minutes scrolling on my phone (do I really have to lift weights?). But the boundary is firm, so eventually I walk inside the gym and lift. And I actually kind of enjoy it once I get started.

As a parent, sharing with my kids about how I creatively get myself to engage in healthy behaviors when I don’t have strong internal motivation is very useful for my kids. 1) It helps them realize that adults struggle with motivation, too. And 2) It helps us get curious together about how to help ourselves do the right thing when our intrinsic motivation isn’t super strong yet.

Type W Motivation: You want to want to do it

The other day, the garbage in the kitchen and the bathroom was very full. I wanted to want to take the garbage out, but I just wasn’t ready yet. This is type W motivation: You want to want to do the task, but there is a resistance to taking action.

Sometimes, like in the case of the garbage, it just takes a little more time. If you wait patiently, the pain of not taking out the garbage will become greater than the resistance. This is a simple type of resistance.

If the resistance persists, and you get stuck in type W motivation for an extended period of time, you can either increase the desire to take action by focusing on the benefits of your goals, the consequences of inaction, or enlisting social support (more on what can help tip us into action coming soon), or you can get curious about what’s fueling your resistance.

If you’d like to continue this conversation, I explore what can complicate resistance, including how fear and avoidance can quietly block motivation, in this related reflection. But for now, it’s important to know that wanting to want to do something is a very good place to be in. And also that DISCUSSING being in this place with your kids can help them to identify and get curious about the things that they want to want to do, too.

A supportive resource for you

If you’re reading this article, I’m guessing you want to help children grow self-compassion. Maybe you’re ready to take action. Or maybe you want to want to make self-compassion practice a regular habit, but you’re encountering a bit of resistance. Or maybe reading and reflecting on my weekly newsletter is just the right amount for now. All of those make sense.

If you’re ready (or almost ready) to take the next step in helping kids grow self-compassion, I’m offering my Raising Resilient Kids: Mini-Course for Managing Big Feelings as a free resource currently available. It’s designed to support kids (and caregivers) in noticing emotions, building resilience habits, and finding playful ways to move through big feelings together.

A parent and child workbook supporting kids with big feelings and motivation.

You can take what’s helpful. Even one small practice can help. Learn more about the mini-course here.

Wherever you are on this journey, we are in it together. Please remember to keep your own internal narrative kind. You are here, reflecting on how to support kids and yourself, and that is great!

I’ll explore more about motivational types in upcoming blogs (we’ve discovered at least 4 more types). In the meantime, feel free to share your own ideas and also get curious about how you can apply motivation types to any goals or intentions that you might be holding.

Wishing you joy, love, and creative motivation,

Jamie Lynn 

Speaking with Your Heart

by | Dec 20, 2025 | Mindfulness, Resilience, Self-Compassion | 0 comments

When you don’t know what to say

Hello friends,

A couple of weeks ago my husband lost his mom, and at first I wasn’t sure how to show up for him. You see, my husband has the chameleon feelings habit, which means he doesn’t like to talk about feelings. Most days, I know what to say to him when things go wrong. He’s coached me over the years to just listen and say things like, “Hmmm…” or “Interesting.” He appreciates this attentive yet casual response more than a direct expression of compassion.

But when his mom passed away, I initially felt anxious about what to say. I didn’t want to overwhelm him with compassion, but a casual response felt inappropriate. Then I remembered a children’s play I had created with a group of kids called Snuggles Stayed Close.

The play, featured in Volume 2 of the Mindfulness and Self-Compassion Workbook for Kids, follows Flame the dragon’s journey when things fall apart. Flame is upset, and all of Flame’s well-meaning friends try to help, but none of the suggestions feel helpful. Then Snuggles the bunny comes close and stays present while Flame slowly moves through feelings and tries helpful habits in their own time.

Thinking of Snuggles’ loving presence helped me remember that I didn’t need to say anything to my husband; I just needed to be present and let him take the lead on what and when he wanted to share. Over and over I reminded myself, “just be like the bunny.”

What this means for us as parents and caregivers

How often do we try to use just the right words or just the right strategy with our kids? In the play, the feelings animals encouraged Flame to feel feelings, and the resilience animals suggested helpful habits, but it was co-regulation with Snuggles that provided the safety for Flame to open to feelings and helpful ideas.

I dedicate my life to teaching kids self-compassion and resilience habits, and it’s humbling to remember that their effectiveness hinges on adults showing up and simply being present. Our connection makes it possible for kids to open to challenging feelings and learn to respond in helpful ways over time.

And what can help us to be present for kids? Self-compassion. Ultimately, the invitation is for us to be like Snuggles for ourselves. We can show up for ourselves with tender self-compassion, sensing what we need over time. There are many ways to grow self-compassion, including taking a Mindful Self-Compassion Course for Caregivers or a Parent-Child Mindfulness and Self-Compassion class.

For further reflection…

I offer a few helpful questions to explore on my Staying Close through Big Feelings page, which features the children’s play Snuggles Stayed Close. You might also enjoy my interview with Cori Doerrfeld, whose book The Rabbit Listened sparked the idea for my play featuring Flame.

As our world can feel a bit topsy-turvy, I hope that you can show up with presence for yourself and create space for all of your feelings. And from this place of love and fullness, I hope you can lovingly show up for the children in your lives.

Wishing you presence and self-compassion,

Jamie Lynn