The Ultimate List of Affirmations for Kids

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Affirmations are a habit in my household for everyone in the family, including my husband and me. I first heard of affirmations from The Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod and began doing it for myself in the morning. Overtime, I found myself repeating them during the day if I was in a difficult situation and giving myself a positive energy boost. So I figured, why not have my kids do this also?

This is a long post on everything you need to get started with affirmations and answers the most frequent questions about creating a habit of affirmations. At the end you’ll find a searchable database of over 200 affirmations for kids. I am constantly adding to the list, so please bookmark this site and come back often!

Why Are Affirmations Important?

Affirmations are important because they help to program your mindset and your unconscious mind.

Kids, in particular, are learning habits and mindset from parents, teachers, classmates, etc. The are bound to pick up some bad habits that seem to have come out of nowhere. For example, when my son moved into a different (older) classroom of pre-school kids, he suddenly became much more aggressive and played rougher than my sweet 3-year old. Affirmations were a way to remind him to be kind and that not everyone (especially mom) wants to play rough.
Affirmations help to set their minds up for positivity and success throughout their entire life. Kids can easily get frustrated when they are learning new things and skills. By instilling a growth mindset with affirmations, they can more easily overcome obstacles instead of giving up.

When Should You Do Affirmations With Your Kids?

I like to do affirmations with my kids in the morning in the car on the way to school. As a busy mom, I like to multi-task as much as possible! When both kids were in daycare, I say the affirmations with them as we were walking into the classroom.

The beauty of affirmations, though, is that you can do them anytime! If my kids are having a hard time with something, I’ll do a “time out” with them to let them calm down, reset, and say an affirmation to help them get back on track. I even do this for myself during the day if I need it!

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How Many Affirmations Should I Do With My Kids?

I think the key here is consistency and quality over quantity. We have our base affirmation that we do as a family every morning, which is a chant: Good, Better, Best! Never let it rest until our good is our better and our better is our best! Some days that is all we have time to do.

On other days, I’ll add in 1-2 affirmations in the morning depending on what is happening with the kids. For example, when my daughter was going to a new classroom at the daycare, I knew she was going to be scared going into a new situation. So during the days surrounding the transition, I had her say “I am brave. I like to try new things,” which helped her through the transition.

For my son, I would have him say “I listen to my teachers and share with my friends” every school day. There was one day when his teacher told me he wasn’t behaving during the entire day, and I realized that we had skipped doing affirmations that day! I’m sure that wasn’t the only reason he misbehaved, but even small things like affirmations can have a big impact on their behavior.

Which Affirmations Should I Do With My Kids?

It’s a very personal decision on which affirmations you want to do with your kids. I would say, just try them out and see which ones resonate with you and your kids. Think about what kind of behavior or mindset you want your kids to have (or what they are struggling with) and find affirmations to help them.

One of the reasons I categorized the affirmations is because I’m often searching for an affirmation to help with a specific situation. Like the example above with my daughter, I specifically picked affirmations about overcoming fear and new situations.

Right now, I’m focused on instill a growth mindset in the kids, so we are doing more of those affirmations. Feel free to experiment and change over time! You don’t need to do the same affirmation if it doesn’t apply to you anymore or it isn’t exciting anymore. Change it up!

Can I Modify These Affirmations or Should I Use it Word for Word?

Yes, feel free to change the words to make them your own! As I was researching affirmations for this post, I noticed there were several variations that you can make for any of these affirmations.

Combine 2-3 related behaviors or emotions. For example, you could combine kind, caring and loving to create one affirmation: I am kind, caring, and loving towards my friends.
Test out different sentence structures. For example, the affirmation “I am kind” could be adjusted to “You are kind.” or “I enjoy being kind.” or “Kindness comes easy to me.”

The Ultimate Searchable List of 200+ Affirmations for Kids

I put together this list of affirmations from my own set that I use with my kids as well as several other online resources. Check out my Pinterest board on Affirmations for Kids for a lot more resources. I am constantly adding to this list, so come back often if you need to pick different ones. If you’d like them all at once in a PDF file, click here to download The Ultimate List of 200+ Affirmations for Kids.