Healthy Minds Compact: Building - Regulation Skills Toolkit
The Regulation Skills Toolkit sits alongside the seven lessons. It gives children opportunities to practise simple regulation techniques before they urgently need them.
The central message is: Notice what is happening → Choose a strategy → Try it → Notice what happens
Children learn that different situations may need different approaches and that there is no single technique that works for everyone, every time. The toolkit introduces three broad types of strategy. Body skills Distraction skills. Connection skills.
The goal is not to teach children one “correct” way to regulate. It is to help them develop a growing bank of choices and the ability to use those choices thoughtfully.
Learning Outcomes
Outcome 1:
• know a range of ways that may help their body and brain settle or refocus
Outcome 2:
• practise body, distraction and connection strategies
Outcome 3:
• notice how different techniques affect them
Outcome 4:
• recognise that the same strategy will not work in every situation
Outcome 5:
• choose a skill that might fit what is happening
Outcome 6:
• try it and notice whether it helped.
Contributing Experts
People who helped produce this lesson.
Lucy Bailey
Lucy Bailey is Founder of Bounce Forward and Healthy Minds for Parents. With two decades of experience in mental resilience and emotional wellbeing, and training 1000s of teachers, parents and other adults around children and young people. Lucy is proud of her early career in youth work and children services. Lucy had a poor experience of school and that has driven her passion to influence UK policy to form a positive system of change with psychological fitness at the core. Lucy has directed national research projects (including the Healthy Minds five year study), is certified by University of Pennsylvania, has an MSc in Practice Based Research, a BSc in Social Policy and Criminology, and a Post-Graduate Certificate in Education. Her published book Raise Resilience: Teach your teenager well has led to the creation of the Psychological Fitness Nana bridging old school wisdom with modern psychology for parents of the 21st century.
About the Organisation
Bounce Forward is the UK’s psychological-fitness charity.
We help children and young people — and the adults and environments around them — develop the understanding, skills and shared language to regulate, recover and adapt through challenge, change and everyday life.
Our work brings together mental resilience and emotional wellbeing, shifting the focus upstream: building capability before crisis, rather than waiting for something to go wrong. We translate evidence from psychology, resilience research, cognitive behavioural approaches and positive psychology into practical learning that can be taught, modelled and used in real life.
From evidence-informed curricula and staff development to family support and whole-community approaches, our work recognises that young people do not develop in isolation. What happens around a young person shapes what becomes possible within them.
Everything we create is practical, grounded in evidence and designed to build something that lasts — psychologically fit people and communities, better prepared to meet life.