Home › Instruments › Cool Kids
Assessment instruments
Cool Kids anxiety program
7 to 17 years
Cool Kids is a structured cognitive behavioural therapy program for anxiety in children and adolescents, developed at Macquarie University. It is not an assessment. It is a treatment program, and it is one of the most thoroughly evaluated anxiety interventions available in Australia.
It runs across roughly ten sessions and involves parents throughout, which is central to how it works rather than incidental to it.
What does the program involve?
Cool Kids teaches a small set of skills and then spends most of its time applying them. Children learn to recognise anxious thinking, to test those thoughts against evidence, and to approach feared situations gradually through a structured stepladder rather than avoiding them.
Parents learn the same material, along with how to respond to anxious behaviour in ways that build confidence rather than accommodate avoidance. This part is frequently the most useful for families, because well-meant reassurance and rescuing are among the most common ways anxiety is inadvertently maintained.
Who is it suitable for?
Children and adolescents roughly between 7 and 17 whose anxiety is interfering with school, friendships, sleep or family life. It covers separation anxiety, social anxiety, generalised worry, specific fears and school refusal.
It is less suitable as a first step where anxiety sits alongside significant other difficulties that need attention first, or where a young person is not yet willing to engage with exposure work. In those cases we would usually start elsewhere and come back to it.
Does it work?
The research base is strong. Across trials, most children who complete a structured CBT program of this kind show meaningful reduction in anxiety, and gains are generally maintained at follow-up.
The main predictor of outcome in practice is completion of the between-session tasks. The stepladder work happens in the week, not in the room, and families who treat the homework as the core of the program rather than an optional extra get considerably more out of it.
Support for anxiety at Ivy
Where a child also has ADHD, autism or a learning difficulty, anxiety work is adapted rather than abandoned, because anxiety in neurodivergent young people responds to the same principles applied with more attention to sensory and processing factors.
Anxiety support at Ivy Psychology
If your child has anxiety, reach out to book in with one of our psychologists. Contact us to discuss which clinician would be the right fit and when they are available.
Not sure which assessment you need?
Our assessment pathway tool asks a few questions and points you to the right starting place. Or speak with our team about what would answer your question.
Related instruments
This page is general information about an assessment instrument and is not clinical advice. Whether a particular assessment is appropriate depends on the individual and the question being asked.