HELPING CHILDREN DEAL WITH ANXIETY
HELPING CHILDREN DEAL WITH ANXIETY
By Sarah Ball | MSW, LICSW
It is not uncommon for parents to ask us how to support their child who is dealing with anxiety, and the answer is not always black or white. Anxiety is an abstract concept, one that is experienced differently for every child and one that is easy for children to hide or not even fully understand. As parents, we never want our child to hurt or be unhappy and we can easily fall into a cycle that exacerbates or reinforces our child’s worry.
Here are some helpful hints for helping children break the cycle of anxiety or worry:
Empathize: Our goal is not to eliminate the anxiety, but to help our child manage it. Anxiety is a normal and unavoidable part of life and if your child had the ability to stop worrying or feel less anxiety, they would have already done so. Let your child know that you hear them. For example, you could say, “This is really hard for you right now.” Your job is to help them feel known and heard, then they can move towards increasing their ability to tolerate or deconstruct the anxious thought or experience. The message you want to send is, “I know you’re scared, and that’s okay, and I’m here, and I’m going to help you get through this (Child Mind Institute).”
Encourage: It is not practical to always whisk our child away from every anxiety-provoking or fearful experience. We want to teach our children to tolerate or cope with their anxiety. We want the child to understand that the emotion will come, peak, and pass. As they feel successful in managing the overwhelming emotion or body response, the stress will drop over time as they are slowly desensitizing themselves to the stressor or event. As parents, we need to express confidence that they can overcome the event when they don’t have that confidence within themselves.
Watch your own anxiety: Children are extremely discerning and can sense our own anxiety which can reinforce or feed their stress. What you don’t want to be saying, with your tone of voice or body language is: “Maybe this is something that you should be afraid of.” For example, if a child has difficulty separating from parent at drop off for school, the next day at drop off, you might be anxious about how he or she will respond, and you may be unintentionally sending a message that he or she should, indeed be worried (Child Mind Institute).
Partner with them: Proactively, try to model healthy ways of handling your own anxiety, so that children have a healthy framework to follow. Let kids hear or see you managing it calmly, tolerating it, and feeling good about getting through it (Child Mind Institute). In the face of a stressful event, be careful to keep the anticipatory period short; we don’t want to jump into a two-hour discussion about the stressful event, as this could cause your child to be more dysregulated or keyed up. Talking through things with your child is also helpful. How can we give the anxiety/worry a name so it doesn’t seem so big? What would happen if the child’s fear came true? How would he/she handle it? Having a plan and ways to cope can reduce the stress in a healthy, effective way.
Get professional help: As a parent, it is so hard to watch a child suffer from fear or worry. If you are still unsure how to help your child, or you fear that your own anxiety is getting in the way, contact a licensed mental health counselor (Imperfect Families).
Sources:
https://imperfectfamilies.com/7-ways-to-help-your-anxious-child/
https://childmind.org/article/what-to-do-and-not-do-when-children-are-anxious/
This feature was first published and shared in October 2019.