Helping Your Anxious Child
Communicating with children can be difficult, especially when anxiety is involved. Anxiety and stress are healthy emotions, but these feelings can sometimes interfere with a child’s day to day life.
Helping Your Anxious Child
Gail Harrison
Communicating with children can be difficult, especially when anxiety is involved. Anxiety and stress are healthy emotions, but these feelings can sometimes interfere with a child’s day to day life. Luckily, there are a couple of tips and tricks to ease communication and help care for an anxious child.
The first tip might seem counterintuitive, but the best way for a child to overcome anxiety is to tolerate the uncomfortable feelings, not to get rid of them. Over time, your child’s tolerance will increase and they will be able to cope more and more easily with stressful situations. Additionally, try not to avoid the situations that make your child uncomfortable. By avoiding distressing situations (e.g., school) this becomes a learned behavior for your child, which creates a maladaptive cycle (e.g., school refusal).
The next tip is to model healthing coping strategies yourself, as the caregiver. Children pick up on surrounding behaviors, so the best way to help a child with their anxiety is to manage your own! The key is not to ignore stress, but to “let kids hear or see you managing it calmly, tolerating it, feeling good about getting through it” (Child Mind Institute, 2023).
Another tip is to manage expectations around a child’s anxiety. Instead of diminishing the uncertainty (e.g., the vaccine at the doctor's office won’t hurt), communicate with your child and “express confidence that they’ll be able to manage whatever happens” (Child Mind Institute, 2023). Additionally, it is important to respect and validate your child’s feelings, but to also encourage them to overcome their fears.
Overall, caring for children with anxiety can be challenging, but one of the best things to do is to not reinforce your child’s anxiety, and empower them to overcome their fears. Confronting distressing situations head-on increases children’s confidence and allows them to continue to overcome their anxiety in whatever situation they might find themselves in, from the doctor’s office to school.
If you are in need of affordable mental health services, the Dean Hope Center is available to help, and you can submit an application via our website.
References:
What to Do (and Not Do) When Children Are Anxious.
10 Tips for Parenting Anxious Kids - Child Mind Institute
Anxiety in kids during COVID-19: What parents should know - Boston Children's Answers