10 Must Try Apps for Kids with Anxiety

 

Mental health apps for kids with anxiety can be effective in offering relief that is accessible, efficient, and portable.  Anxiety can affect young children, tweens, and teens.  While 1 in 5 children have an anxiety disorder, many others suffer from anxiety during certain activities or situations.  

These apps offer children and teens an easy opportunity to take care of their mental health needs whenever they arise.  Due to the common use of Smartphones, children and teens are able to use these apps effectively.   

Many of these apps offer free subscriptions to teachers for their classrooms, allowing these apps for kids with anxiety to be accessible by all students, often on classroom technology.  

For children and teens on a school 504 or IEP due to anxiety, these apps can be added to your child’s unique plan as a coping tool to independently work through emotional issues in a safe and productive manner.  

 

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.

 

 

Please share your experiences using these apps for kids with anxiety or any other apps you have found to be successful in helping to manage anxiety in your child to teen.