Tips for Parents: How You Can Help Your Child Cope with Anxiety

By Alicia Byelich, MS

My last blog post, “The Importance of Treating Your Child’s Anxiety”, drew attention to how your child’s untreated anxiety may negatively affect them as they grow into adulthood. Using evidence-based research, we discovered the importance of seeking treatment to give your child tools to help cope with the symptoms of anxiety. As a parent, you hold an important role, in either helping or enabling your child’s anxiety. Sometimes, we can get caught up in the immediate desire to help our children “feel better” and, instead of helping, we unintentionally enable their anxiety. In this blog we will discuss ways you may unintentionally reinforce your child’s anxiety and review some healthy ways you can help your child cope with their symptoms.

Before we dive in, I do want to stress that children go through various developmental stages. It is important to assess at which developmental stage your child is, so that you do not expect your child to complete certain tasks that are developmentally too advanced. Also, your child’s fears could be the result of being unsafe or harmed in some way. Therefore, it is important to assess whether your child’s fears are the direct result of being in an unsafe situation. You can always reach out to your pediatrician or counselor for more advice on what may or may not be “normal” fear-based behavior and help formulate goals for your child that are developmentally appropriate.

One mistake that parents make when wanting to help ease their child’s anxiety is through parental accommodation. This occurs when parents change their behavior to “accommodate” or relieve some of the anxiety their children experience when faced with anxiety producing situations or stimuli (Kagan et al., 2016). Some ways that parents may accommodate include changing routines, allowing their child to avoid anxiety triggering situations, and providing an overabundance of reassurance to relieve the child’s anxiousness (Salloum et al., 2018). Some common examples of parental accommodation are ordering food for your children when they are scared to talk to the waiter/waitress, lying in bed for hours at night to relieve your child’s anxiety, or avoiding places like zoos, parks, or pools because your child is fearful. Research shows 88% to 97% of parents accommodate their child’s anxiety in some way (Salloum et al., 2018). And, as a mother of three boys, I am guilty as charged!

Most people, at some point, will lay in bed with their child who is scared. I’m certainly not saying never lay in bed with your child if they are scared; but you must ask yourself whether or not this is becoming a nightly occurrence. If it is, it may be time to consider whether your accommodation is, in the long term, helpful or harmful.

How is parental accommodation a problem? “Accommodation conflicts with the emphasis Cognitive Behavioral Therapy places on reducing avoidance and facing feared stimuli” (Kagan et al., 2016, p. 845); it reinforces the child’s fears and prevents opportunities to experience and learn corrective thought processes and behaviors (Salloum et al., 2018). Your child must face their fears to learn that they are capable of handling them, it is important that they learn that they can talk to a waiter/waitress, or go to sleep without mom or dad there, or see snakes at a zoo without being harmed. Their brains benefit from the opportunity to recognize that, while they may feel uncomfortable, they are not in danger. In order to do this though, they need to be exposed to their fears. Children’s brains cannot get re-wired, so to speak, if they are being accommodated; with accommodation their fears are being validated.

So then, what can you do to help your child who is struggling with anxious thoughts or fears? Number one, LISTEN. Don’t minimize their fears or anxiety by saying things like “You don’t need to worry about that” because, the truth is, they don’t want to be worrying and if they could stop it, they most likely would. Instead, normalize and empathize. For example: “I know you feel scared to go to sleep alone in your room; that is a terrible feeling (empathizing), I remember how I felt when I was scared to go to sleep alone at your age (normalizing).”

Find out from your child what their specific fear is. Are they scared a monster will come out from under their bed, are they scared a snake will attack them at the zoo, or are they scared that the waitress would laugh at them when they order? Help your child challenge that thought by acting like a detective gathering evidence. Together come up with questions like, “How often have I seen a monster under my bed?” “When have I seen a waitress laugh at someone?” “When was the last time I saw a snake escape it’s cage?” Write down the evidence that challenges their thoughts.

Help your child to verbalize how their body feels when they are anxious. Do they have trouble breathing? Do they get sweaty? Does their heart pound? Feeling uncomfortable in their body can add to their anxiety. So, normalize their bodily responses. “When we get scared, our bodies sometimes make us feel uncomfortable. What does your body feel like when you get scared?” Again, empathize and normalize.

Help alleviate some of the uncomfortable bodily responses with symptom management and practice. If they state their breathing gets shallow or fast paced , teach them a breathing exercise (there are many on the internet). You can start by asking a younger child to imagine they are holding a pinwheel. Teach your child to breathe in deeply through their nose and slowly breathe out of their mouths to make their imaginary pinwheel spin (they can use a real one too). For older children teach them to breathe in through their nose for a count of 4, hold their breath for a count of 7, and breathe out of their mouths for a count of 8. This will help regulate some of the bodily sensations they are feeling. By actively controlling their breathing they help regulate and calm down their nervous system. Controlling their breath will also help them feel more in control of their body at times when they feel their body is out of control.

These are just a few tips that may help your child feel more comfortable and also help you as a parent to provide tools that will help your child cope with anxious feelings instead of accommodating their fears. Please reach out for more support if your child is struggling with anxiety, we are eager to help.

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References:

Kagan, E. R., Peterman, J. S., Carper, M. M., & Kendall, P. C. (2016). Accommodation and treatment of anxious youth. Depression and Anxiety, 33(9), 840. https://doi.org/10.1002/da.22520

Salloum, A., Andel, R., Lewin, A. B., Johnco, C., McBride, N. M., & Storch, E. A. (2018). Family accommodation as a predictor of cognitive-behavioral treatment outcome for childhood anxiety. Families in Society, 99(1), 45–55. https://doi.org/10.1177/1044389418756326