Size of the Problem Activity: an Interactive Sorting Game for Kids

About the technique

Size of the problem is a visual scale, from tiny to huge, that helps a child rate how big a problem is and then choose a reaction that fits. It is common in school counseling and social-emotional learning, and it has no single published originator or controlled trials of its own. The skills it practices, however, are standard in child cognitive-behavioral therapy: noticing how intense a feeling is, recognizing that a reaction can be bigger than the event, and picking a coping step to match.

Child CBT programs teach exactly this sequence. In Philip Kendall’s Coping Cat program, children learn to recognize their anxious feelings and work through coping steps, and the program outperformed a waitlist in a randomized trial (Kendall, 1994). For anger and aggression, cognitive-behavioral programs for children and adolescents that teach self-monitoring and problem-solving reduced anger and aggressive behavior in a meta-analysis (Sukhodolsky et al., 2004). School programs that teach emotion regulation also improved behavior and social skills (Durlak et al., 2011). The scale is a practice-based way to make those skills concrete for younger children.

Use it with care. Its purpose is to help a child calibrate a response, never to tell them their distress is too big. A problem can feel huge to a child even when it looks small to an adult, so start by acknowledging the feeling, then talk about size. Any disclosure of harm, abuse or danger is always a big or huge problem, whatever the child rates it, and may bring your reporting duties into play.