5 Tips for Parenting Your Anxious Kid

Your child is struggling with anxiety and you feel like you keep falling short in helping them overcome it. Maybe your words are losing their impact, or they get short with you and start a fight whenever you try to help. This is some of the most difficult parenting. We bring children into this world with the intention of helping them conquer challenges that pop up and ultimately live happy lives! The problem is, they’re struggling and while we watch them struggle our instincts take over. We become a little less intentional and a little more anxious and reactive ourselves.

The following steps will help you help your child to navigate these anxious feelings:

1. Educate Yourself

Anxiety is a necessary part of our existence. It’s what notifies us that something’s happening that we don’t like, or that danger is coming. The problem is that your child has started to see things that aren’t cause for a total autonomic nervous system uproar as a MAJOR threat to their well being. Their wires have been crossed causing them to respond to physical threats and emotional threats with the same intensity. Over time, their mind and body can’t tell the difference. It gets harder and harder to talk them out of it and they begin to go into a ‘fight or flight’ mode almost instantly. 

The good news is, if your child didn’t have this ability then they wouldn’t be able to protect themselves when a real threat arose. For example, if they didn’t have this response then they’d be walking down a dark alley at night without any ability to defend themselves (if needed) from the stranger who is swiftly walking up behind them! We can honor that their body is doing exactly what it’s supposed to when it feels threatened AND encourage them to respond to the not-so-life-threatening situation more appropriately. Evolution is very much a “use it or lose it” kind of thing, and your child is just overusing it.

2. Do your own work

This one is two-fold. First, anxiety can be a reinforced or learned behavior. It could be reinforced when they see you respond to minor situations with more distress than necessary and they’re mimicking. “This thing must be very bad or mom wouldn’t be so upset, I need to be careful.” The problem is, they don’t know what else is going on in our life or internal world that’s made the fact that we forgot to get milk while we were at the grocery store as cause for a meltdown. Additionally, it can be learned when we give too much attention to our child when they’re anxious and they begin to identify the behavior as something they can do to get your attention, affection, etc. Your family dog might sit in front of you panting until you get up and let him outside, similarly, your child will have a meltdown to achieve a desired response!

Second, anxiety is contagious. Have you ever seen those videos of someone on the train laughing at something on their phone, and as they continue to belly laugh you start to see each person on the train start giggling along with them one by one till the whole train car is cackling together? Well, the same thing happens with anxiety. Even if you aren’t verbalizing it, your body is showing it and they’re picking up on it. In the afternoon, you might already be anticipating the backlash you’ll get when you ask your child if they’ve done their homework, and they might be preparing for a fight themselves just waiting for you to ask. In that instance, your body & mind are already in fight or flight mode. Doing your own work can help notice and counteract what you’re bringing to the table, so your child can learn to let down their battle shield.

3. Stop accommodating the symptom

Accommodating the symptom might sound like a good thing at first. Schools make accommodations for kids who need help and it’s always to their benefit, right? Well, at home it’s a very different story. Accommodating can look like: cleaning up after them because you know they’ll fall apart when you remind them, ordering for them at a restaurant because they’re too nervous to tell the waiter what they want, or emailing the teacher before school letting them know your child’s homework won’t be turned in because they had worked themselves up so much they couldn’t finish it. These all seem like harmless things the first time we do it, because they are. We’re trying to help them feel better and solve the problem quickly. We think we’re showing them that it’s not that big of a deal. “See, I just ordered your food and the waiter was so nice, was that really so hard?” But what we’re really doing is showing them how unsafe the situation is because we gave them our protection from it.

4. Start asking more ‘curious’ questions & let your child fill in the blanks

When your child begins to tell you about something that’s making them anxious, as we discussed earlier, we become worried and anxious ourselves. If your child comes home telling you about how a classmate said they didn’t want to play with them at recess we tend to jump in with a string of questions, “Are you getting bullied? Did you tell the teacher? Did you tell them to leave you alone?” A couple of questions just clarifying what happened, but really, these questions are leading and giving your child the clarity that whatever happened is bad! 

Instead, ask open-ended questions one at a time. For example, “What else happened?” “Did anyone hear this happening?” “What did you say?” “How do you feel about it?” Questions like these allow your child to disclose more information about what happened without us jumping to conclusions, and they have the chance to say how they feel about it without any emotional nudging from us. In the end, your child will start deciding what to do in these situations on their own, and, BONUS, if they get stuck they’ll start asking you for help… when they ask for it, they’ll be more receptive to it. This helps build resiliency and assertiveness skills for your child, and is less work for you overall!

5. Be the commentator

Ever feel like when you child gets stuck on something the more options and alternatives you give them to solving the problem the less likely they are to listen? You have valuable guidance to give your child, but they won’t hear you unless they choose to. For example, if your child is getting stuck on their homework, rather than jumping in to help them tackle the problem when you hear their big sigh of frustration, just point it out. “Hmm.. you sound frustrated.” Ideally, this would lead to your child eventually asking for help, which will make them more open to actually receiving it. 

Act like you’re a sportscaster giving the play-by-play. They don’t take the players spot on the field if they make a wrong move, they just observe and reflect. This helps athletes learn what they’re doing wrong and figure out how to improve, right? So, why can’t the same type of commentary help your child do the same? Of course, we can tell them what to do and in the moment it feels easier because we tend to see it before they do. But anxiety stems partly from feeling a loss of control, which is why most things we’re anxious about are future related. We have no control over the future, but we can influence a small percentage of our future based on how we act today. When we give them the answers or try to problem solve for them too quickly we’re actually influencing them to have more problems in the future that they’ll feel incapable of solving on their own.

If you walk away with anything from these 5 steps, let it be this: it does not have to be your job to make your child feel better, instead, it can be your job to get them better at learning how to respond to their feelings. The more comfortable we let them get with their anxiety, the less of a hold it will have over them. Today, you have permission to do less.

Try picking one of the above steps to work on this week! Write it on a post-it and put it on your mirror, or set it as an alarm on your phone that goes off once a day when you might need it most.