What are some simple coping skills I can teach my child for big feelings?

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The easiest way to teach a child coping skills is to give them simple, concrete words and actions they can reach for before the big feeling takes over, not just in the middle of a meltdown. A coping skills alphabet works well because it turns an abstract idea like 'self-regulation' into something small, visual and memorable, one letter at a time.

Why does my child need words for feelings, not just calming down?

A lot of us were taught to calm down without ever being taught how. We built a free Coping Skills Alphabet at Nomii for exactly this gap, pairing each letter with a word and an action, things like breathing, counting, drawing, or asking for a hug, so kids (and the adults around them) have a shared language for the hard moments instead of just a demand to stop crying. This matters even more in our house. I was diagnosed with Autism and ADHD at 37, not long after my son was diagnosed, and one of the hardest parts of being late-diagnosed is realising how long I went without the vocabulary for what was happening in my own body. I don't want my son to spend decades getting to that same realisation. Giving him words early, while his brain is still forming how it understands its own signals, is one of the few things I can actually do something about now.

How do I actually use something like a coping skills alphabet day to day?

The point isn't to sit a child down and teach the whole alphabet in one go. It's to have it somewhere visible, on the fridge, in a bag, saved on your phone, so that when a feeling shows up, there's already a word and an action ready to go. Over time kids start picking their own letters, the ones that actually work for their body, and that becomes their real toolkit, built by them rather than handed down as a rule.

What's the real takeaway for parents of neurodivergent kids especially?

Emotional regulation isn't a switch kids either have or don't have, it's a skill built from repetition, and repetition needs language. The sooner a child has words for 'my body feels too fast right now' or 'I need to squeeze something,' the sooner they can ask for what they actually need instead of just melting down because there's no other way to say it.

Start small. Pick two or three letters from the alphabet that match things your child already does naturally, name them out loud together, and build from there rather than trying to install the whole system overnight.

These are exactly the kinds of small, real moments I built Nomii to hold onto, the day my son found his own word for 'too loud,' or the first time he asked for a break instead of melting down, kept safe and private in one place rather than scattered across apps that aren't really built for a family's story.