ABSTRACT Background For children it’s common to be scared of medical procedures. Pain and anxiety are a sensory feeling of discomfort that are strongly related to one another. There are non-pharmacological alternatives for reducing pain and anxiety in children one example is distraction. Distraction is used to divert the child’s focus from the pain and anxiety during the medical procedure.    Aim To investigate the effect of distraction as a non-pharmacological alternative to reduce children’s procedural pain and anxiety. Method Literature review with descriptive design, the databases used to select articles was PubMed and Cinahl. The result is based on 12 original article that have a quantitative approach. Results The result shows that distraction is an effective alternative of non-pharmacological pain relief. Distraction reduces the procedure-related pain and anxiety in children between the ages of two and thirteen who undergo a needle-related procedure. The result of the most effective distraction method vary between the different studies. No distraction method caused children more pain and anxiety. Conclusion Distraction (both active and passive) are effective methods for the nurse to use in the care to reduce the procedural pain and anxiety in children. It's difficult to draw any conclusions on which distraction method that are the most effective. The results describe different distraction methods and their effect, which can help nurses get better knowledge to use in their clinical work to reduce children's procedural pain and anxiety in needle-related procedures.