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What is Anxiety?<\/strong><\/p>\n Intense, excessive and persistent worry and fear about everyday situations. Fast heart rate, rapid breathing, sweating and feeling tired may occur.<\/p>\n Understanding the roots of anxiety is essential and also that it is not your fault is the first step to moving away from its crippling effects on your life. Cortisol, the stress hormone is persistently triggered and released leaving man of us in living in the constant state of flight or fight. The habit of practical self care is essential to implement when dealing with anxiety.<\/p>\n When children are chronically anxious, even the most well-meaning parents can fall into a negative cycle and, not wanting a child to suffer, actually exacerbate the youngster\u2019s anxiety. It happens when parents, anticipating a child\u2019s fears, try to protect her from them. Here are pointers for helping children escape the cycle of anxiety.<\/p>\n What to do and not to do when children are in anxiety?<\/strong><\/p>\n 1. The goal isn\u2019t to eliminate anxiety, but to help a child manage it.<\/strong><\/p>\n None of us wants to see a child unhappy, but the best way to help kids overcome anxiety isn\u2019t to try to remove stressors that trigger it. It\u2019s to help them learn to tolerate their anxiety and function as well as they can, even when they\u2019re anxious. And as a byproduct of that, the anxiety will decrease or fall away over time.<\/p>\n 2. Don\u2019t avoid things just because they make a child anxious.<\/strong><\/p>\n Helping children avoid the things they are afraid of will make them feel better in the short term, but it reinforces the anxiety over the long run. If a child in an uncomfortable situation gets upset, starts to cry\u2014not to be manipulative, but just because that\u2019s how she feels\u2014and her parents whisk her out of there, or remove the thing she\u2019s afraid of, she\u2019s learned that coping mechanism, and that cycle has the potential to repeat itself.<\/p>\n 3. Express positive\u2014but realistic\u2014expectations.<\/strong><\/p>\n You can\u2019t promise a child that his fears are unrealistic\u2014that he won\u2019t fail a test, that he\u2019ll have fun ice skating, or that another child won\u2019t laugh at him during show & tell. But you can express confidence that he\u2019s going to be okay, he will be able to manage it, and that, as he faces his fears, the anxiety level will drop over time. This gives him confidence that your expectations are realistic, and that you\u2019re not going to ask him to do something he can\u2019t handle.<\/p>\n 4. Respect her feelings, but don\u2019t empower them.<\/strong><\/p>\n It\u2019s important to understand that validation doesn\u2019t always mean agreement. So if a child is terrified about going to the doctor because she\u2019s due for a shot, you don\u2019t want to belittle her fears, but you also don\u2019t want to amplify them.You want to listen and be empathetic, help her understand what she\u2019s anxious about, and encourage her to feel that she can face her fears. The message you want to send is, \u201cI know you\u2019re scared, and that\u2019s okay, and I\u2019m here, and I\u2019m going to help you get through this.\u201d<\/p>\n 5. Don\u2019t ask leading questions.<\/strong><\/p>\n Encourage your child to talk about his feelings, but try not to ask leading questions\u2014 \u201cAre you anxious about the big test? Are you worried about the science fair?\u201d To avoid feeding the cycle of anxiety, just ask open-ended questions: \u201cHow are you feeling about the science fair?\u201d<\/p>\n 6. Don\u2019t reinforce the child\u2019s fears.<\/strong><\/p>\n What you don\u2019t want to do is be saying, with your tone of voice or body language: \u201cMaybe this is something that you should be afraid of.\u201d Let\u2019s say a child has had a negative experience with a dog. Next time she\u2019s around a dog, you might be anxious about how she will respond, and you might unintentionally send a message that she should, indeed, be worried.<\/p>\n 7. Encourage the child to tolerate her anxiety.<\/strong><\/p>\n Let your child know that you appreciate the work it takes to tolerate anxiety in order to do what he wants or needs to do. It\u2019s really encouraging him to engage in life and to let the anxiety take its natural curve. We call it the \u201chabituation curve\u201d\u2014it will drop over time as he continues to have contact with the stressor. It might not drop to zero, it might not drop as quickly as you would like, but that\u2019s how we get over our fears.<\/p>\n 8. Try to keep the anticipatory period short.<\/strong><\/p>\n When we\u2019re afraid of something, the hardest time is really before we do it. So another rule of thumb for parents is to really try to eliminate or reduce the anticipatory period. If a child is nervous about going to a doctor\u2019s appointment, you don\u2019t want to launch into a discussion about it two hours before you go; that\u2019s likely to get your child more keyed up. So just try to shorten that period to a minimum.<\/p>\n 9. Think things through with the child.<\/strong><\/p>\n Sometimes it helps to talk through what would happen if a child\u2019s fear came true\u2014how would she handle it? A child who\u2019s anxious about separating from her parents might worry about what would happen if they didn\u2019t come to pick her up. So we talk about that. If your mom doesn\u2019t come at the end of soccer practice, what would you do? \u201cWell I would tell the coach my mom\u2019s not here.\u201d And what do you think the coach would do? \u201cWell he would call my mom. Or he would wait with me.\u201d A child who\u2019s afraid that a stranger might be sent to pick her up can have a code word from her parents that anyone they sent would know. For some kids, having a plan can reduce the uncertainty in a healthy, effective way.<\/p>\n 10. Try to model healthy ways of handling anxiety.<\/strong><\/p>\n There are multiple ways you can help kids handle anxiety by letting them see how you cope with anxiety yourself. Kids are perceptive, and they\u2019re going to take it in if you keep complaining on the phone to a friend that you can\u2019t handle the stress or the anxiety. I\u2019m not saying to pretend that you don\u2019t have stress and anxiety, but let kids hear or see you managing it calmly, tolerating it, feeling good about getting through it.<\/p>\n Reference: Articles from Dr. Clark Goldstein’s Child and Mind Institute. She is a child and adolescent psychologist who specializes in the treatment of anxiety and mood disorders.<\/p>\n [\/vc_column_text][\/vc_column][\/vc_row]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Intense, excessive and persistent worry and fear about everyday situations. Fast heart rate, rapid breathing, sweating and feeling tired may occur. 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