Project Parenthood

How to help your anxious child

Episode Summary

If your child is the type who seems to worry about everything, here are some tips for understanding your child's anxiety.

Episode Notes

Do you have a child who seems to worry about everything? Is your kid the type who’s afraid to try new things, convinced that it’s impossible for them to get through it? Are you wanting so much to help your anxious kiddo but you don’t know where to begin? Dr. Nanika Coor offers ideas for how to understand your child’s anxiety and how to help them live a less worried way of life.

Project Parenthood is hosted by Dr. Nanika Coor. A transcript is available at Simplecast.

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Episode Transcription

Hey parents! You're listening to the Project Parenthood podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Nanika Coor, clinical psychologist and respectful parenting therapist. Each week, I’ll introduce you to the same respectful parenting practices that I use to help parents repair and deepen connections with their children. You’ll get tips for cultivating more parental self-compassion, more cooperation from your kids, and more joy, peace, and resilience in your relationship with them. 

In today’s episode, I’m talking about helping your children develop the skill of handling their fears and worries. Stick around till the end to hear about a creative way to help your child reframe their worried thoughts.

When your child has a brain that is often telling them to anticipate every possible thing that could go wrong or to be overly cautious in a situation, it can be baffling and overwhelming for parents. You might find yourself feeling very overprotective, impatient, or judgemental because it’s hard to understand what your child is feeling or perceiving when they’re anxious. You can feel stuck—the whole family held hostage by your child’s anxiety. You don’t know how to fix it. You often wish for some kind of magic wand that could stop your child’s anxiety in its tracks. You might be wondering: why does this even happen?

Understanding how anxiety works can help you empathize with your child, and when they register your understanding and empathy, they are more likely to accept your help and your influence.

Fear helps humans survive

The human species would not survive without the ability to detect the presence or level of danger and take actions to avoid it—so we’ve evolved an inner defense system. In the part of the brain that processes emotional experiences is a structure called the amygdala. It’s always scanning our environment for cues of safety and danger, and if the amygdala concludes that danger is present, it mobilizes all of our body systems to survive the perceived threat—to either fight, run for our life (flight), or play dead (freeze). When the perceived danger or threat has passed, the logical part of the brain, the prefrontal cortex, sends signals to the amygdala to put on the brakes and settle down, and the body’s systems slowly return to its baseline equilibrium. 

The thing is, the amygdala doesn’t always make accurate assessments and can cause your child’s body (or yours) to mobilize for survival when there is no threat or danger to fear. The interactions of genetics, how your child’s brain is wired, their temperament, the parenting behaviors they’re raised with, and environmental factors like trauma all contribute to your child’s sensitivity to or resilience in the face of anxiety. 

Your child isn’t giving you a hard time, they’re having a hard time

It’s easier to empathize with your anxious child when you understand that anxiety impacts your child’s body, thoughts, behaviors, and feelings. Every child will be impacted in these areas to some degree, but your child could be impacted by one of these areas much more than the others.

Your child’s body may tense, tremble, or sweat. Their heart may race, they might feel lightheaded, nauseous, or have a dry mouth. Their body temperature might change and their pupils might dilate. These are all the body’s survival systems gearing up for a fight/flight reaction and when there’s no danger or when fight/flight actions are inappropriate to the situation, the build-up of that tension in their body is extremely unpleasant for them. 

Anxious children pay more attention to things that make them anxious than things that make them feel safe or neutral. They also generally find more things threatening. Plus—when a child is anxious, they necessarily hyperfocus on the negative. The human brain has evolved to deal with threats first and put everything else on hold until safety is regained. So it makes sense that your child can’t pay attention or talk about anything else but their fear! Their mind is telling them there’s a fire and mobilizing them to put it out, but because the fire is imagined rather than real, there’s no fight/flight/freeze action your child could take to make themselves feel safe again. They’re stuck in tunnel vision about their fear without being able to make it stop. 

Thoughts are not always intentional—they can just pop into our heads out of nowhere whether we want them or not, and anxious kids might have more anxious thoughts than other kinds of thoughts. Trying to push away thoughts usually has the opposite effect. Your child may spend a lot of time trying to push thoughts away that just come back bigger and stronger. 

You might see a great deal of avoidance behavior—your child doing or not doing things in an attempt to stay away from anxiety-triggering things—and this avoidance can grow to include more and more people, places, and things. Anxious kids can have trouble sleeping or have lots of nightmares. They may undereat or overeat. They may be in constant conflict with family members, excessively clingy, irritable, rigid, or controlling, or have explosive meltdowns. They may not enjoy things they usually would. Your kiddo is struggling—they’re not trying to make you miserable. They don’t want to feel this bad. 

Parenting strategies that can reduce anxious behaviors in kids

Helping your child with anxious feelings in the moment

The first step in making contact with a very worried child is through empathy. Verbally or nonverbally, acknowledge what is going on for them, let them know you’re on their side, and that you can see how their anxiousness is interfering with what they want to do. That could sound like: “I know this is making you really upset.” Or: “Everything feels like a struggle right now, I hear you.” 

The next step is to reframe the problem as a glitch in their brain functioning—a false alarm telling them there is danger when there isn’t, so it’s not to be trusted. Invite your child to get angry with or humorously scold their anxiety for bothering them with annoying thoughts and lying to them about all the bad things that could happen. This can help your child learn to dismiss those kinds of worries when they arise. Help them differentiate their lying “worry voice” from their own thoughts. 

Next, help your child do a true/false test on all of their “what ifs” of the problem to separate their feelings from the truth: Will every person in your class laugh at you if you raise your hand to answer a question? Will Dad forget to pick you up so you have to stay at school all night?

When your child is in the heat of an anxiety moment their body will get amped, going into survival mode. You can say, in a calm voice, “This is a hard moment, but I know we can get through it together! When you’re ready you can try to slow yourself down.” If they’re really agitated it may be some time before they’re ready to slow down their breathing. It’s important to firmly encourage them to do so when they feel they’re ready.

Then, help your child move forward. “If you weren’t anxious right now, what would you want to be doing? Let’s start doing that and then your brain can switch channels and get back to calm thinking.” And lastly, acknowledge how well they used coping skills to get through a tough moment! Praise any even partial behavior they did in the spirit of coping to reinforce their hard work. 

Anxiety phase or anxiety problem?

It’s completely normal in childhood and adolescence to experience anxiety in new social situations, in the dark, when sleeping alone, after nightmares, and when dealing with the scrutiny of one’s peers on social media. But how can you know when your child is suffering from anxiety? 

When your child is simply experiencing the normal anxiety that comes with things like challenging life experiences or difficult periods of development, their worry seems reasonable. You’d expect a child entering a new 3rd-grade class in a new city in the middle of a school year to be nervous on the first day, for instance. It’s an age-appropriate response.

Your child will be responsive to suggestions you might make for feeling calmer or making the day easier for themselves. They understand that they’ll have to face this temporary uncomfortable situation. They’ll accept your reassurance and take in the information you give them about what they can expect to happen. Outside of the school setting, they don’t display much anxious behavior. And as the school year progresses, the intensity of their anxiety begins to dissipate, and they gain some resilience from having weathered a challenging time. 

It’s time to seek help for your child if they refuse attempts you might make to talk with them about the problem, if they don’t seem to understand what’s happening to them or how they might work on a solution, or if their distress seems to worsen rather than lessen over time and none of the help you offer them is actually reducing their worries. This might look like worry and fear that seems developmentally out of sync with their age and disproportionate to the situation, or them becoming overwhelmed or shutting down when you offer suggestions. Reassurance doesn’t help—they are distressed about the present and the future. They’ve begun to worry about more and more things and become focused on avoiding the feared thing rather than how or why they might overcome it. And perhaps you’re noticing that the anxiety has been interfering with their growth, development, and daily functioning for over a month. 

Getting professional treatment

Anxiety disorders are the most treatable psychiatric condition—and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is the gold standard treatment. It involves challenging anxious thoughts, exposure to feared objects and situations, relaxation techniques, and learning to take control of feelings. Medications can also be used to reduce childhood anxiety and are best used in conjunction with CBT treatment. It’s important to remember that beginning, discontinuing, or switching medications should always be done in consultation with a prescriber who has personally evaluated your child. 

Make sure that in addition to treatment, your child is getting regular and nourishing meals, limiting caffeine, and getting an appropriate amount of sleep each night and physical activity or movement each day! 

Challenge yourself! 

Your parenting challenge this week is to collaborate with your child on externalizing their “worry voice.”

Have your child think of a name for their worry voice—let’s say it’s Madame Scaredy. Draw a picture of it or make a puppet to represent it. Then you do a role play acting out the two roles yourself, both Madame Scaredy and your child’s real truth-telling voice—let’s call it Brave Sally. 

You, as Madame Scaredy: “Hey Sally, don’t forget that swim lessons are REALLY scary. All that water? All that splashing? You gotta tell Mama that you don’t want to go!”

You, as Brave Sally: Oh no you don’t! I know this isn’t MY voice talking to me—it’s YOU Madame Scaredy, and I’m not listening! You’re so annoying! And you don’t even know me, you’re just a false alarm!”

Or: “Oh just stop it! My parents wouldn’t even let me be in danger—so obviously swimming lessons are safe Madame Scaredy!”

Or: “Hey! You’re just my brain overreacting silly, but I don’t need to.”

Or even: “You’re just an annoying pop-up—I’m clicking ‘close’ now!”

Do 2 or 3 rounds of the worry voice telling lies and Brave Sally giving that Madame Scaredy worry voice a hilariously hard time. Then invite your child to join the role play and give them a chance to play the brave voice.

For older children, explain that worry is their body’s false alarm going off when there isn’t anything dangerous to deal with at all - or at least isn’t as threatening as their brain’s proverbial “spam” is telling them it is. Invite them to give their spammy brain voice a funny name and boss back the worry when it tries to trick them. Let them know the more they correct the spam worry voice, the more their brain gets used to sending alarms when there’s something risky happening - and it won’t bug them with the little things. Invite them to draw a picture of their spam worry brain and role play with them some ‘bossing back’ the spam they get from their brain. 

Tell teens that they can learn to treat their inner worry talk (their brain overreacting) differently than their rational thoughts, that they don’t have to trust it. Imagine it’s a caricature of a bumbling superhero super-villain. They can choose to pay it no respect - give it no authority - and turn down its volume or turn it off entirely. With practice, they can teach the super-villain over-reactive part of their brain to calm down more and they can think more rationally about their abilities and what they can handle. Ask them if they want to practice, and if so, you can role play! 

Then, the next time your teen comes to you with a worry or fear, after acknowledging how hard it can be to have thoughts like that, you can remind teens that they can turn down the volume on their inner super-villain. With young kids try saying something like:

“Uh oh—sounds like Madame Scaredy up to her old tricks again! Well, not this time, pal—Sally is in control here! You tell ‘er Sally!” and see if your child joins you in bossing back their worry voice! 

Test it out and report back! 

Your kids need to feel safe coming to you with their worries, so instead of telling your child to “just get over it” or colluding with them to avoid any kind of discomfort or distress, show them that you’re on their side and that you get it. Get the support you need so that you don’t get overwhelmed by your child’s distress, and so that you have the bandwidth to help your child realize that things get easier when they deal with the things that cause them anxiety rather than avoid them.

Sources: 

Chansky, T. (2008). Freeing your child from anxiety: Powerful, practical solutions to overcome your child's fears, worries, and phobias. Harmony.

Lebowitz, E. R. (2020). Breaking Free of Child Anxiety and OCD: A Scientifically Proven Program for Parents. Oxford University Press.