Tips on helping your little one if they are suffering with anxiety

Anxiety and children are not two words you would usually associate with one another

• The goal isn’t to eliminate anxiety, but to help your child manage it. No parent wants to see their child unhappy, but the best way to help kids overcome anxiety isn’t to try to remove stressors that trigger it. It’s to help them learn to tolerate their anxiety and function, as well as they, can, even when they’re anxious. And as a by-product of that, the anxiety will decrease or fall away over time.
• Don’t avoid things just because they make your child anxious. Helping children avoid the things they are afraid of will make them feel better in the short term, but it reinforces the anxiety over the long run. For example: if a child in an uncomfortable situation gets upset, starts to cry—not to be manipulative, but just because that’s how she feels—and her parents whisk her out of there, or remove the thing she’s afraid of, she’s learned that coping mechanism and that cycle has the potential to repeat itself.
• Respect their feelings, but don’t empower them. It’s important to understand that validation doesn’t always mean agreement. If your little one is terrified of going to the doctor, you don’t want to belittle their fears, but you also don’t want to amplify them. You want to listen and be empathetic, help them to understand what they are anxious about, and encourage them to feel that they can face their fears. Let them know that you understand their fears and you are there to help them overcome them!
• Try to keep the anticipatory period short. When we’re afraid of something, the hardest time is really before we do it. Another rule of thumb for parents is to really try to eliminate or reduce the anticipatory period. If a child is nervous about going to a doctor’s appointment, you don’t want to get into a discussion about it two hours before you go- that’s likely to get your child more worked up. So just try to shorten that period to a minimum.
• Think things through with the child. Sometimes it helps to talk through what would happen if a child’s fear came true—how would they handle it? A child who’s anxious about separating from her parents might worry about what would happen if they didn’t pick him up from school. So, we talk about that. Ask your child what they might do if they didn’t spot their parent at pick up. Let them know they could tell their teacher and then their teacher could call their parent. A child who’s afraid that a stranger might be sent to pick her up can have a code word from her parents that anyone they sent would know. For some kids, having a plan can reduce the uncertainty in a healthy, effective way.
• Try to show them healthy ways of handling anxiety. There are multiple ways you can help kids handle anxiety by letting them see how you cope with anxiety yourself. Kids are perceptive, and they’re going to take it in if you keep complaining about it on the phone to a friend that you can’t handle the stress or the anxiety. I’m not saying to pretend that you don’t have stress and anxiety, but let kids hear or see you managing it calmly, tolerating it, feeling good about getting through it.