Supporting Your Kids with Anxiety

It may come as no surprise that developing your child’s emotional intelligence is a sure-fire way to build their confidence and emotional regulation skills in order to fend off anxiety. Let’s jump straight into some strategies that you can use today to help your kids manage their anxiety!

Teach your child about control.

Our kids often don’t realise that worries and anxieties are about things that are not even in their control. (Sometimes we as adults don’t either!) So it’s important to have a really good chat about how things in life fall into two categories. Things we can’t control (give some easy examples to begin with, like the weather) and things we can control (e.g. what we wear, what we eat). Teach them how it is no good to try to change things that are outside their control, and how important it is to focus our attention on things that are within their control. For example, when it’s raining outside and we planned a trip to the beach, there’s no point getting upset about the rain but we can decide to see a movie instead. Deeper issues around friendships, siblings, and other people are important to talk about too. We can’t control other people, their actions or their words, but we can control our thoughts, our kindness, our own behaviour. Teach your kids to let go what they can’t control, and focus on what they can control.

Have a nightly routine.

As well as managing kids’ anxiety on the fly, there needs to be some support at other times during the day to keep the skills of keeping calm at the forefront of their mind. A perfect opportunity is to add a short activity into their nightly routine just before bed. Bedtime can be a quiet time you spend one-on-one with your child to talk about their worries and how to let them go, as well as practicing some simple grounding exercises. This is also great for helping kids nod off without them ruminating on their anxieties.

Try this: Ask your child to think of a current worry they have, to close their eyes and imagine moving the worry from their brain to their closed fist. Ask them to grab it tight and squeeze it for a few seconds, then release their fist. Tell them that as they open their hand, the worry floats away and they need not think about it anymore. It’s a small, easy action that you can model as a parent first and show them how you feel lighter and happier afterward – and ready for a good night’s sleep (or day ahead if you do it in the morning!)

“We have two radio stations in our brain, one with helpful thoughts, the other with unhelpful thoughts.”

Change their radio station!

A final way to help manage your child’s anxieties is to teach them positive self-talk. I like to talk about having two different radio stations in our brain! We don’t realise, but our radio station is often set to the negative or unhelpful station by default (due to our ancestors’ need for the fight or flight response). This means kids, especially worriers can be thinking negative thoughts, such as ‘I probably won’t get picked’ and ‘This is so hard, I can’t do it!’. We can change their self-talk and therefore help them tackle their worries when they come up. Talk to them about the radio station concept, and how it takes work to catch out the negative (unhelpful) station’s thoughts and change them to positive (or helpful). Instead of thinking ‘I’ll never get this finished’, they can change the ‘station’ and their thoughts to something like ‘I bet if I work hard I can finish this in no time’.

Know that there is so much we can do as parents to support our kids’ anxieties. It always starts with just one conversation!

If you’d like to chat with me about how to help your kids' manage their worries and frustrations, let’s organise a free 30 min chat! You can be anywhere in the world thanks to the internet, so why not drop me a message and we will tee up a time to chat. Use the enquiry form below to get in touch.

By Stephanie Pinto.