3 Way to Help Your Anxious Child
Watching your child struggle with anxiety can be heartbreaking and leave parents feeling lost and helpless about how to help their child. On top of feeling helpless, as the anxiety grows, you may find that you are sacrificing more and more to lessen its effects on your child. The good news is that anxiety is treatable and there are things parents can do to help their kids overcome it.
Here are three tips for helping your child through their anxiety:
Don’t avoid it
Anxiety grows bigger and stronger when we allow it to tell us what we can and cannot do. It might relieve the distress and uncomfortable feelings for a day, but it only reinforces the idea that avoiding what makes someone anxious is the only way to overcome it.
For many parents, when their child is in distress, their natural instinct is to try to help their child by taking what is causing that distress away. When dealing with anxiety, it makes sense why encouraging a child to face their fears and subjecting them to discomfort is counterintuitive for a lot of parents. However, supporting your child through doing scary things and not helping them avoid what triggers their anxiety, only works to make the anxiety bigger.
Offer Support
Another way to respond when your child’s anxiety shows up is to offer them support through it. Support in this sense involves two parts. First, acknowledge what your child is feeling. Let them know that you see it is hard for them and empathize with what they are going through. Second, instill confidence in them that no matter what happens you know they will get through it. We may not be able to assure them that everything will be okay but they can make it through the hard feelings.
If your child is suffering from severe anxiety and is not ready to face their fears, start small and introduce them to the idea that avoidance only makes the anxiety worse. Starting a conversation with them about how they think they should start facing the anxiety is a great way to get them involved.
Find a therapist
Finding a therapist who is CBT informed can make a huge difference in the life of an anxious child or teen. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy allows a child to be gradually exposed to things that trigger their anxiety in a safe setting. Children can also learn techniques for identifying their anxious feelings and valuable coping skills for when they come up.
Therapists can also work with parents to focus on behavioral changes that parents can make to increase their child’s tolerance to anxiety. Parents and therapists work to gradually decrease accommodations that the family may be making that are not only making the anxiety bigger, but may also be causing a lot of stress to the family as a whole.
By Amanda Kohl, MCHI
SCHEDULE AN APPOINTMENT with Amanda Kohl, MCHI: https://SouthTampaTherapyBOOKAPPT.as.me/AmandaKohlMHCI