Help Your Child Manage Anxiety: Tips for Parents

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It’s becoming obvious that the number of children experiencing anxiety is growing exponentially. This could be because it’s being diagnosed more frequently or because social media is spreading anxiety like a plague. Either way, my firm belief is that parents are key in helping a child manage anxiety.

Why? Because parents are with them for many hours of the day, every day, every week etc and their influence is greater than that of outsiders.

There is a caveat, of course (isn’t there always?!): parents need to manage their own anxiety before they can help their child.

So – with that in mind, let’s take a stroll through a basic “curriculum”, if you like. What needs to be learnt by your child and committed to long-term memory so that the knowledge is there to be used and manipulated when feelings and symptoms of anxiety start up?

What knowledge does your child need to manage anxiety?

Like with any subject at school, unless your child knows the information they cannot use it when they need it. You can tell them and they will forget! Or you can regularly practise and repeat it with them so it goes into long-term memory and is available.

Obviously, the age of your child comes into play. But strangely enough, the information can be endlessly rehearsed with them in many age-appropriate ways, using child-friendly language, and added to over the years. So they'll learn the kowledge they need and grow in understanding as anxious moments occur that you cannot necessarily defend them against.

This means you’ll end up with resilient teens who can manage their emotions, fears, and anxieties far better.

So here’s some basic knowledge you need to impart to your child on a daily and weekly basis to ensure they learn it thoroughly:

  • What anxiety is
  • Why and when anxiety is useful
  • What can trigger anxiety and why
  • What reactions happen in the body
  • How thoughts influence feelings
  • Anxiety is temporary
  • Breathing can control physical symptoms of anxiety
  • Specific ways to control anxiety

Clearly, each of these can be broken into smaller parts to enable your child to grasp a better understanding. The trick, though, is to always use language at a level your child can manage because then you can keep revising their “knowledge” without sounding like a parrotting school teacher!

How to use appropriate language to impart this knowledge

One example might be with a five year old. You might call anxiety "worry" (even though there is technically a slight difference):

  1. “Worry is getting a headache or tummy ache when you think of something you’re going to do.”
  2. “Worry makes you feel unhappy about something.”
  3. “We don’t like worry, do we! It spoils our day! But sometimes it’s good to stop and think whether the worry is a good one.”

When they’ve grasped what worry or anxiety is, you can start making sure your child knows it’s actually good to worry, for example, when you’re being horrid to someone; or if you might be going to run across a road.

You can only do this with them when they’ve grasped the earlier bit.

How does teaching your child these facts help them manage anxiety?

The thing is, we have a short-term memory and a long-term memory. Stuff you tell them goes in one ear and out the other, as I’m sure you’ve discovered! Unless it’s things they overheard and should NOT have!

Seriously, short-term memory is limited to things like remembering they're going upstairs to clean their teeth. Even then, they’re likely to forget. And it can get overwhelmed with too much info at once.

What you need is for important stuff to be stored in long-term memory. The only way of moving it there is to keep repeating/rehearsing/going over it till it’s in there for good.

Because their brains are still growing, you need to revise things longer than you might otherwise to keep them current and available. Same applies to Maths from year 1 to year 11! If not, they can’t recall fractions and use them in clever equations later.

So – to help this generation, and your child in particular, to manage anxiety you need to make sure the list above is being taught as a natural thing to know for a quite a few years.

How will you teach your child to manage anxiety?

Here are some tips to help manage anxiety:

  1. Use some of the excellent books available at the right age for your child.
  2. Use your own (selective!) anxieties or worries and think out loud how you’re solving them. Model managing anxiety.
  3. When your child has a worry, hear it out and then repeat in the appropriate words your understanding of it and why it’s happening (including the bodily symptoms) and how to deal with it there and then.
  4. Find my Fish Hammer Gift activity and use it. 
  5. Make use of the range of strategies for reducing anxiety that are on this website and choose the appropriate one for the occasion.
  6. Wherever possible don’t let the anxious moment overrule the event. Pulling out reinforces that it’s too scary to get through. Find a way to push through that is manageable for both of you. Expect them to manage. Bring out their best. Always. And celebrate they won out over anxiety.

How does gratitude help your child manage anxiety?

There’s one extra trick I’ve learnt that seems to feed into all areas of life when you adopt it as a family. And that’s being grateful for something or someone and expressing that specific fact.

It seems to bring everything into perspective without diminishing the fact of being anxious – and therefore acts as a good pivot for dealing with it. It’s like a base of resilience to jump off from.

So, help your child focus on daily gratitude for what they have – this encourages an outward-facing attitude, which in turn changes the focus of the moment. Hear them out first, of course, but link in the idea of gratitude.  While they're expressing gratitude for something, you may find you can help your child use that fact to help them solve the anxious moment.

For example, if they're worried about meeting someone new:

“Let’s name and be grateful for all the kind people you’ve met who aren’t scary at all. This new person might be a 10 out of 10 too! Let me know what you think is their score after you’ve met them and you can tell me why you gave them that score.” (See how the focus shifts?)

(Maybe this last one is a step too far for a younger child, in which case either change it to a visual activity or you can still instil gratitude but as a daily routine, not right then.)

Conclusion?

No one said parenting was easy haha! But some of the things we learn to do in therapy sessions with children can easily be transported to the home environment and carried out by parents. Learning to manage anxiety is one of them.

With a shortage of therapy sessions available to children at the moment, this is one place you can start. Give it a go?

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