Supportive parenting for anxious children
Parenting a child who is anxious is a tough journey.
In this pandemic the challenge is even tougher, for parents a constant cycle of reassurance and frustration - one step forwards and another one backwards.
How can we help our anxious children to move on, to expand their horizons and to live the fulfilling life we want for them?
Parents can find themselves saying these sorts of things:
“It’s not frightening, there’s nothing to be afraid of”
“He can’t handle stress; it’s just too much for him”
“I need to protect her from having panic attacks and from feeling anxious”
Parenting can become either too dismissive or too protective
This can happen when parents are under stress and unsure about how to help a child with their anxiety. Sometimes one parent is dismissive while the other is protective, causing confusion for the child and conflict for the parents, struggling over which path to take.
Dr. Eli Lebowitz, director of the Program for Anxiety Disorders at Yale University has devised a programme to help parents with very anxious children.
He has taken the principles of Non-Violent Resistance parenting (see previous reflection Parenting in a Pandemic) and applied them specifically to anxiety in children. He describes his approach in this short video.
His suggestions are simple to remember but need to be applied thoughtfully and specifically to each child’s particular context and family environment.
Accept and acknowledge that your child is anxious
You might need to re-phrase some of the things you would have said previously:
“I can see you are scared but I believe you will be ok”
“I know this is hard for you but I think you can manage it”
“It’s my job to prepare you for the challenges of life”
Believe and convey that your child can tolerate anxiety
It is easy for parents and other family members to become drawn in by their child’s anxiety and to feel overwhelmed by it. This in itself can create anxiety for parents and the cycle seems never-ending.
Expressing confidence that your child can tolerate anxiety may in turn increase your confidence as a parent.
Reduce accommodating behaviours and increase support
An anxious child can affect the way the whole family behaves; the personal boundaries between parents and their children can become eroded.
Protective parents might change schedules to accommodate a child, participate in obsessive compulsive rituals around the home to make a child feel safe, reassure a child in response to their anxious questions, do things for a child when they are too afraid to do them on their own.
Dismissive parents might become frustrated and unavailable to an anxious child, respond angrily and feel ineffective as they are unable to change the child’s anxiety resulting in the child feeling left alone and isolated.
By identifying ways in which parents accommodate their children’s behaviour and working to reduce these bit by bit, anxiety can be managed, challenged and ultimately hold less power in the child’s life.
Parents are encouraged to work together
The goal is for parents or family members to communicate with each other about how to support their child and to plan together to reduce accommodating behaviours, in small manageable steps.
The effects of the pandemic on anxiety in children are perhaps yet to be fully revealed; it is important to consider how to apply these principles to each specific family situation so that we are better prepared to help our children when restrictions on us are eventually relaxed.