In our guide on Creating Effective & Inspiring Play Spaces (you can download it for free here), we had briefly introduced our calm down corner. Amazingly, I’ve had so many questions (a barrage really!) from parents on our calm down corner, so I thought I would spend some time talking about how it serves as a positive tool in regulating emotions, and how to create one!

Do also read through our blog series on Respectful Parenting (click for Part I, Part II and Part III), a calm down corner is very much in line with Respectful Parenting principles.

First, a little backstory...

We set up and introduced the calm down corner to our boy T back in Dec 2018, when he just turned 3 years old. I’ve heard about calm down corners (sometimes known as peaceful corner, chill-out corner, quiet corner) for a while now, but truth be told, was never truly bothered to set one up. T is a relatively gentle and mild-mannered boy, he didn’t have much tantrums – they were mostly short emotional outbursts which were really easy to manage and seemingly only occurring at home (never in public). I honestly thought my husband and I had this in the bag!

When he turned 3, coupled with the news of a 2nd baby coming and me being pretty much out of it (nauseous, exhausted) and not able to spend time with him like I usually do – he started throwing 30 mins (at least) long meltdowns. Sometimes they go up to an hour. They were triggered by the slightest things and could happen anywhere and everywhere.

When I first got pregnant with our boy, little T, 3 years ago, I was pretty lost on how to modify our house (essentially designed as a couple pad) into a baby-friendly home. I scoured through tons of amazing photos on Pinterest for inspiration, followed some moms on Instagram to peek at how their homes look like, and started reading up on play spaces.

In creating our play space at home, we are largely inspired by Montessori principles. We talked about the Montessori principles we follow in our Learning Approaches.

It took us about 6 months of trying out different layouts - moving furniture here and there, arranging toys in different ways etc - before we finally created a play space for T which we are extremely satisfied with.