Anxiety-maintaining factors for parents to consider: what are they?

Anxiety-maintaining factors? What parent would even think of doing those??!

Well, that’s the crux of it really. We don’t think. We do the first thing that comes into our heads and comfort our children. Because we can’t bear to see their distress.

Isn’t that what all good parents should do? Comfort and console?

True. But sadly, it’s also true that this and several other habits  actually maintain their anxiety inadvertently when we reckon we’re doing the obvious thing to help them!

Here are a few other anxiety-maintaining factors that turn out not to be the “best thing”.

  • We reassure them that something feared will not happen.
  • We tell them “everything will turn out fine, you just see”.
  • We don’t explain that everyone has worries and the best thing to do is work through them.
  • We take a strict view and make them do it anyway – pushing them "coldly" into it (because it hurts us to have to do it).
  • We allow them to NOT do whatever it is, because we want them to feel better.
Anxiety maintaining tactics in a child showing delight they don't have to go, with thought bubble

Any of the actions above, and others, can produce unwanted, anxiety-maintaining results:

  • Your child can lose trust because we seemingly lied – it DID happen.
  • You child thinks you don’t care because you didn’t really “hear” their fear and worry.
  • Even if you did explain that we all have worries, they didn’t get the help they needed to work through their own  anxiety at that minute.
  • They feel utterly alone because you pushed them into a situation without help – just when they most needed to feel supported.
  • They will learn they can avoid anything unpleasant in future because you “let them off”.

This doesn’t make sense, does it? But it's easy to understand that NOW because we’re reading this while we’re NOT in the midst of that emotionally intense moment when your child is 

  • scared stiff, and 
  • you have no idea how to help them, and 
  • are overcome with love and concern for them.

And there's another important point. As parents, we can all feel judged by other parents and our own wider family when we do take a wiser, more helpful (in the long term) course of action. It’s especially difficult to do the better thing when we’re in public, or other adults/parents are present in the house.

  • Do they think we’re being unreasonable “given the child’s age”? 
  • Do they think we’re rubbish parents because we “don’t give in”? 
  • Are they (the relatives/friends?) letting our children avoid things when we’re not there? We might as well give in.

Let’s take a look at some better ways to deal with worries – ones that won’t involve maintaining your child’s anxiety.

Two ways to deal with your child’s anxiety without maintaining it

1 Deal with your own anxiety and share how you do it with your child

Every time your child's anxious or worried, you yourself can become a little anxious. You might even be an anxious person by nature.

Either way, it's good to find a way to deal with it and to be relatively open about how you deal with it – bearing in mind the age of your child, of course. There are ways of sharing a topic without crossing a barrier that would be inappropriate. 

And if there isn’t a way, then that’s the time to deal with your worry privately first, so it doesn’t transmit to your child and become an anxiety-maintaining factor for them. They pick up absolutely everything! And if you don’t address it, they'll believe that some worrying situations are definitely to be avoided.

There are many ways to deal with your anxiety, but some include:

Any of these strategies can be shared with your child as a means of moving them outside their own anxious zone long enough to think up a way forward.

If you want to read some more helpful advice for parents who're anxious about their children’s anxieties, anxiety.org has a good blog post here.

2 Help your child deal with the anxiety as it comes up

The key here is not to take your child out of the anxiety-provoking situation but to help them through it to the other side. This way, they learn that anxieties can be managed.

Taking them out of the situation, or allowing them to not go or not do, is a chief factor in maintaining anxiety.

This is sometimes called "accommodation". This means you alter your behaviour to suit your child's anxiety. Ever crossed the road to avoid them passing a dog?? Or let them sleep in your bed for far longer than might normally happen? Even taken a bus instead of the train as the clackety-clack upsets them?

It's pretty obvious, when we stop and think, that this isn't going to solve the anxiety, simply push it forward. But it's really hard not to do this as caring parents. But a study has shown that helping the parents change their behaviour around their child's anxiety (in the SPACE programme) has had more success than trying to change the child!

Good ways to help your child deal with a specific anxiety are to

  • acknowledge it exists
  • use the breathing exercises you've already taught them (you have, haven't you?) to help them calm down
  • explain that everyone feels anxious but that facing up to it is the way to take control and be powerful
  • sit down with them and work out exactly what the problem is and discuss ways to alter the thought behind it, the feeling the thought leads to, and therefore the desire to not do or not go.

When you know exactly what the anxiety is about, you can choose the Types of Anxiety tab, or the Causes of Anxiety tab if you want some extra fill-in knowledge.

Here’s a link that will help you with ideas to get started talking with your child and reducing their anxiety, to avoid then getting into anxiety-maintaining tactics: Strategies to help.

But all pages on the site are filled with ideas or suggestions that will possibly be just the thing you need for the age your child is.

Which coping strategies does your child use that are actually anxiety-maintaining factors?

Anxiety-maintaining tactic 1: Sensitisation

Your child might fill their minds with everything about the anxiety/fear. Worrying about you, or going to a party, for example. Or focusing on all that might go wrong and anticipating it, and constantly rehearsing what will happen.

Anxiety-maintaining tactic 2: Safety behaviours

Your child will seek your presence or your reassurance constantly, or maybe carry an "lucky" object with them just in case, or insist a particular someone accompanies them to a specific place.

Anxiety-maintaining tactic 3: Anxious avoidance or escape

Your child will continually avoid the thing that fills them with anxiety. The problem with this one is that your child never learns they can actually deal with – or at least tolerate – the situation. They learn something different, in fact: that their avoidance behaviour worked just fine and got rid of the anxiety. It’s a very short-term strategy!

How do you reverse these anxiety-maintaining factors?

1 Stop the sensitisation with a diagram.

All this worrying must be exhausting your child. Explain to them how they're keeping the worry going by attending to it so much.

Fun task. If you can, tell them to look round and name all the things of a certain colour or shape in the room eg red. When they’ve done this, simply say, “And how many were yellow (or whatever)?” No peeping. I can guarantee they will not have noticed. 

That’s your evidence – that by focusing on a fear and perpetuating it, they are not even noticing all the other things that go right, or might help, or are fun to do!

When they’ve seen the logic in this, start drawing a diagram of what could go right instead. Then get them to start testing things out like a scientist, proving or disproving their ideas and jotting down results. This will help diminish anxiety-maintaining behaviours.

2 Shift the safety behaviour with a planned agreement

This might be something like agreeing you will answer their repeated question twice and no more. Or that they will only carry the lucky object twice in a week. Or on the next occasion, as a trial, someone else will go with them and your child will report back how it felt and why. 

Any agreement is OK that means you’re both future-focused to limit the role of the safety behaviour. But you will also be listening to them and talking with them regularly about the causes of their anxiety, of course, and helping them understand how it’s better to deal with it than let it spoil their fun.

3 Escape the avoidance with a step-by-step plan

A good place to start is with this activity. 

Agreeing some stepping stones with your child is a good way for them to get from A to B (their desired goal) with less stress than trying to jump all the way at once. 

You can apply the example in my link to anything. Just work with your child to think up some easy-to-harder steps on separate pieces of paper, sort them into their preferred order and number them. Your child then attempts them one at a time. As they chose the order themselves, they can rearrange it too, if they want to.

Be sure to praise their courage in trying the steps and achieving them. Allow as long as is necessary for each step, but keep the agreed plan in their sights! Otherwise, that's their avoidance kicking in again! Which is, um, anxiety-maintaining behaviour... A vicious circle.

The take-home message here is just to be aware of all the ways you might be accidentally encouraging your child to continue being anxious, despite feeling you're doing all the things you should do. No parent does it deliberately. And it's pretty easy to change things around and NOT do those things!

A book to end with...

Cover of Anxious Kids Anxious Parents

Wilson and Lyons wrote this book a few years ago – before the pandemic was ever thought of! But it's outstanding, still, as one of the few books I know of that deals with both parent anxieties and child anxieties and how they can get mixed up – and describes excellent ways to steer a course through them. Together.

(I get no benefit from any purchase you make.)

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