If you have an anxious kid, you may be well aware of how anxiety functions in the day to day, why anxiety exists, and effective approaches to addressing anxiety. Having familiarity with this knowledge base can be a step towards feeling like a helpful support for your child, and you can refresh your memory with our blogs What is Anxiety and How Does It Work?, and How Can I Help My Anxious Child?.
Even so, having this knowledge on hand may not comprehensibly soothe the day-to-day challenges that families with anxious kids face. Here are some ways that you can help your child face their fears and embrace bravery, either during or outside of therapy.
Help your child bravely approach situations or things that make them feel anxious.
Most often, anxious people will avoid the things that make them anxious, because it’s unpleasant to feel that way. Staying away from the things, people, or moments that can make a child anxious allows them to escape from those feelings. The downside is that the more they avoid, the less able they will be to successfully manage feelings of anxiety in the moment.
Anxiety has power over us when we allow it to control our actions. Encouraging your child to approach situations that make them anxious can help them take power back by facing their fears. Through practice, they will become more able to tolerate anxiety and live their life to the fullest instead of avoiding stressful situations.
Encourage other adults in your child’s life to take this same approach with your child. By enlisting other adults in their life, the brave approach to anxiety will become a part of daily practice and structure for your child. When many adults around a child are supporters of the same message, the child themselves will become an expert at managing anxiety themselves.
On that note, we want to remember that the goal is to manage anxiety, not to eliminate it.
Anxiety has an evolutionary function; it was developed over human history as a function to keep us safe from things that may be dangerous. In some ways, anxiety is like an alarm bell that tells us when we need to pay attention to potentially harmful situations. When working to the level we want it to, anxiety helps us stay prepared for school or work and stay safe from physical harm in our day-to-day lives. Some people experience anxiety to differing degrees, and individuals with anxiety disorders experience it to a degree that interferes with their daily functioning.
For these people, it’s important to remember that the goal in treatment and making progress is not to eliminate anxiety completely. The aim should be to build their ability to tolerate worries, to recognize when something is truly dangerous or if it is the anxiety speaking, to build skills to manage feelings of anxiety in the body, and to build self-confidence!
Keep it real with your child and communicate realistic expectations.
Kids who are anxious may talk about their worries a lot or seek out a lot of reassurance. As caregivers, it can be really hard to resist reassuring your child that everything is going to be okay, even if you don’t fully know if that’s true. They might worry about failing a test, embarrassing themselves at school, or forgetting the routine for a performance they have coming up. Instead of promising them that the thing they fear won’t happen to comfort them, lean on acknowledging their feelings and follow by emphasizing that you believe they can handle the situation. We want them to know that we believe in their ability to get through hard moments, and that hard moments will come in life.
Talking with your child about their anxiety in a supportive and calm manner can help model for them how to address worries when they come up. You can help them determine whether their fear is likely to happen and even come up with a plan for how to get through that moment if it does happen. The plan can be to talk to a teacher, do some deep breathing, or to use another relaxation skill that they know. Processing their worries in a way that is encouraging and realistic can help them feel capable of taking it on.
Give anxiety a character to make it easier and maybe even fun to talk about!
Representing anxiety as a pesky little trickster that lives inside our brains can be a fun way to talk about the impact that anxiety can have on our behavior with young kids. By turning anxiety into a character that is trying to get control, we can create some distance between the child and their experience of anxiety. Externalizing this feeling and giving it a character and a name can give the child a way to talk about their anxiety without being self-blaming or shaming. It can also be a fun way for caregivers and kids to share the ways that the anxiety trickster has tried to get them, and the ways in which you all managed to overcome it!
Cheer them on by praising their brave behaviors!
Doing things that make you anxious can be extremely challenging, especially because feeling anxiety can be so unpleasant. Being brave is a huge step towards progress, and noticing every moment that your child is brave is important. Catch these moments and praise them for their brave behavior. Every praise of brave behavior will make it more likely for them to be brave again next time.
It can be hard to parent a kid or teen with anxiety, and at the same time, having a supportive caregiver can be incredibly helpful in overcoming anxiety.
Want to learn more?
- Watch our FREE anxiety webinar
- Read How to Manage Your Own Anxiety While Parenting, and Why It’s Important
- Contact us