Many adults will have experienced anxiety at some point in their lives. A little bit of anxiety can be highly motivational and helpful in the right situations, but it can also be disabling and detrimental to your life. And even as adults, anxiety can be pretty challenging to overcome. Anxiety in children can be extremely worrying, and as a parent its only natural you want to comfort them and protect them from the thing that is making them feel anxious.
But is that the right thing to do? This post is going to dive into how you can help your anxious young child overcome their fears and build their confidence to help them thrive.
Identify Triggers
At first, both you and your child need to be proactive in identifying these anxiety triggers and understanding what is causing these intense feelings to surface. This proactive approach will empower you to know how to best approach the situation.
Have them talk to you about the triggers and why they cause them to feel the way they do if they can explain it.
Listen and Validate
Take the time to listen and validate your child’s fears and worries. Validation is not about agreeing with their fears but about acknowledging their feelings and showing empathy. They might not understand why they feel the way they do or what is worrying them so much. Your child needs you to understand them, support them, and let them know it’s okay to be worried. This isn’t reinforcing their fears; it’s simply understanding them and acknowledging that they feel this way.
Change Unhelpful Thinking
While you need to validate your child’s concerns, you also play a significant role in helping them change how they think about certain worries and fears. By asking questions that challenge their negative thoughts, you can guide them towards a more positive mindset.
Let’s say they think they will fail a test. Ask them why they feel this way, what is so different about this test from other tests, and if they have failed before when nothing is different.
If your child is younger, you can simply talk to them about their fears, allow them to express themselves the best they know how, and then change things around to give them a more helpful and positive pain at an age-appropriate level.
Use Tools
At this point, introducing tools that help them manage their fears can be a great idea. If they’re afraid of the dark, giving them a light they can hold and control when in bed cna be a good option; kid-safe flashlights or push lights can work in this scenario. You might find children’s books for facing fears helpful as you can read the story and help them understand how others overcome their fears so they, too, can move past them.
Assess your child’s fear and the reaction, then look for different tools you can use to help eliminate some or all of the fear.
Role Play
If your child is receptive to this, engaging in role-playing can help you both connect and work through the scary scenario in a safe and controlled environment. This can be a powerful tool to help them overcome their fears.
For older kids, if they’re getting the bus alone or walking home alone, you can arrange for someone to meet them on the bus if they get on themselves. You can also use video calls to support them, but let them be alone and work through this with just your virtual presence.
Build Confidence
Building confidence in other areas can give your child the courage to tackle the big, scary anxiety-inducing thing that they don’t like. By building them up in other areas and praising their ability to do different tasks or activities, you can make them feel good about themselves, and this confidence can spill over to be a tool they can use to push through their anxiety.
Teach Them Coping Skills
If they are old enough to follow simple instructions and understand you, a great idea is to teach them how to manage and deal with feelings of anxiety and behaviors that come with this. It might be deep breathing. It might imagine something else is happening, or it can be calmly singing to themselves until the fear subsides. Find something your child can use to help them when they need it the most.
When dealing with anxiety in children, it is important not to minimize what they’re going through and appear annoyed or label their feelings as bad, as this will be massively detrimental to their development as they get older. Instead, treat them with compassion and help them to find ways to work through their feelings and overcome what is impacting them.
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