ACT skills for children and adolescents
Practical experiential exercises to build emotional resilience
Learn how to bring ACT to life for children and adolescents with practical, creative, and engaging strategies tailored to their needs. This workshop will equip you with fun, flexible, and accessible tools to help young people manage difficult thoughts, make room for emotions, and take meaningful steps toward what truly matters, all while encouraging emotional resilience and building skills for life. Whether you’re new to ACT or looking to enhance your practice, this workshop will provide the inspiration and confidence to integrate ACT into your work with young people.
Background to the workshop
Supporting young people through the challenges of growing up requires tools that are both developmentally appropriate and engaging. ACT processes are particularly well-suited to helping young people build emotional resilience, navigate life’s difficulties, and connect with what truly matters. However, for ACT to be impactful, exercises must engage young people, offering practical, creative, and fun approaches that hold their attention and encourage participation. This workshop acknowledges these needs, equipping professionals with strategies and activities tailored to the emotional needs of young people.
What you will gain from this workshop
This workshop is packed with practical tools and techniques to help young people navigate their internal worlds and build more meaningful lives. You’ll learn creative and engaging ways to introduce ACT concepts, helping young people understand why ‘control is the problem, not the solution’. Through hands-on skills and exercises, you’ll be equipped to support young people in untangling difficult thoughts, making room for emotions, and connecting with what truly matters.
You will also learn how to ensure ‘buy-in’ from young people from the get-go when introducing the ACT approach, including clever and creative ways to convey why ‘control is the problem, not the solution’.
Crucially you will develop core skills in using ACT processes with young people:
Tangled-up to getting unstuck
- Help young people develop a toolkit of simple but effective skills to ‘defuse’ or untangle themselves from painful and bossy difficult thoughts, so they can be freer to do what matters more of the time.
Resisting to coexisting
- Support young people to drop counterproductive attempts at avoidance by discovering effective strategies that show them how to make room for difficult emotions.
- Learn how to guide children through a powerful and immersive visualisation, so they can start to benefit from a more accepting orientation towards internal experiences.
Barely there to fully aware
- Help young people move from the daze of autopilot living to the connection and vibrancy of present moment awareness. Learn how to teach a repertoire of mindfulness activities, integrating different sensory elements and varying from quiet reflection to active playfulness. Help young people to develop flexible mindful attention through a novel and creative exercise, highly effective for developing valuable neutral-noticing skills.
Surviving to thriving
- Discover how much young people appreciate conversations which step away from the dominant discourse of achievement and success.
- Learn how easy it is, with the right approach, to engage young people in value-based conversations, and how powerful this can be in enabling them to take steps towards a more purposeful and meaningful life.
You will receive electronic handouts, including scripts for guiding young people through the practical exercises.
About this workshop
All skills taught can be used as stand-alone exercises, making them suitable for one-off support and brief individual interventions, including by those who may not be mental health specialists. The skills are also powerful tools to integrate into groups for young people, particularly non-targeted groups such as waiting list support, wellbeing groups within schools and targeted preventative mental health groups.
Victoria and Chloe are experienced clinical psychologists who have both worked in university research roles. Victoria and Chloe are founders of the InTER-ACT programme, a bespoke, research-driven resilience intervention for children and adolescents.
Who will benefit from this workshop?
The skills taught will be particularly relevant for professionals working in universal services (e.g., schools and community settings) and prevention-focused roles aimed at promoting wellbeing and resilience. They will also be highly applicable for those providing early help and targeted interventions. Additionally, many of the skills covered have proven valuable in supporting young people facing more complex difficulties.
A wide range of professionals who interact with children and young people through their work will benefit from the workshop, including psychologists, counsellors, social workers, teachers, education mental health practitioners (EMHPs), youth workers and GPs. The workshop is suitable for those with limited prior ACT experience and the skills covered are suitable for young people aged around 9 years to 16 years.
A basic working knowledge of ACT is recommended. If you need to brush up on the model, we offer a free on-demand introduction to ACT workshop to help you prepare.
APA psychologists: This program is sponsored by Contextual Consulting and is approved for 3 CE credits for psychologists.
Nationally certified counselors: This workshop is available for 3 credit hours. Contextual Consulting Ltd. has been approved by NBCC as an Approved Continuing Education Provider, ACEP No. 7578.
To find out more, including attendance requirements and how to access your certificate, go to our continuing education information page.
If you have disability and require adjustments or accommodation, please email us at admin@contextualconsulting.co.uk to discuss your needs and we will do our best to help you.
Booking cancellation
The registration fee will be refunded minus a administration charge if cancellations are received at least two weeks before the workshop date.
Cancellations within two weeks of the event date are charged the full registration fee, other than in exceptional circumstances that can be verified.
Event cancellation
In the event of cancellation of the course outside of our control we will not be held accountable for travel and/or accommodation costs incurred. However, the workshop fees will be refunded.
All workshops will be subject to minimum delegate numbers being met; in the event that a workshop should be cancelled delegates will be given no less than 2 months’ notice.
Replacing delegates
If a delegate is unable to attend and a replacement is nominated there may be a charge depending on the individual circumstances, this will be advised at the time. Please contact the us to request a replacement of delegates at least a week before the workshop date.
Contextual Consulting is committed to the identification and resolution of potential conflicts of interest in the planning, promotion, delivery, and evaluation of continuing education. Potential conflicts of interest occur when an individual assumes a professional role in the planning, promotion, delivery, or evaluation of continuing education where personal, professional, legal, financial, or other interests could reasonably be expected to impair their objectivity, competence, or effectiveness.
There was no commercial support for this event. None of the planners or presenters for this educational activity have relevant financial relationship(s) to disclose with ineligible companies whose primary business is producing, marketing, selling, re-selling, or distributing healthcare products used by or on patients.
By the end of this workshop, participants will be able to:
- Effectively introduce ACT concepts to young people in a way that secures their engagement and ensures ‘buy-in’, using creative and age-appropriate explanations and activities.
- Apply practical defusion techniques to help young people untangle themselves from difficult thoughts and shift towards actions aligned with their values.
- Guide young people in experiential exercises to increase emotional acceptance, including immersive visualisations and strategies to co-exist with difficult emotions.
- Teach mindfulness and present-moment awareness skills through a repertoire of engaging activities, integrating sensory and playful elements to match developmental needs.