Is your child overly anxious? Worried about school? Stressing about being away from family? Avoiding activities you know they’d love if only they could put their worries aside?
Believe it or not, the person best placed to help a child work through their worries and anxieties is not always a therapist – it’s more often a parent, carer, or another person who is very close to them. At Youth Untroubled we recognise this, so when we work with families we equip them with the skills they need to help their child to tackle their anxieties. That way, if worries reoccur in the future – as they often do – you know exactly how to help.
Here’s a step-by-step of what we tend to guide families to do when their child is suffering with anxiety:
1. Encourage your child to talk openly about their worries/fears.
Ask your child how their worries make them feel – this can be physically and/or emotionally. What do their worries make them think and believe? Being able to name their fears and understand how they make them feel is one of the first steps in overcoming them – once you are both clear exactly what the problem is, you can start to work on it together.
2. Help them to create a pyramid of worries.
Once your child has been able to name their worries, help them to organise what they are worried about with the biggest/most worrisome things at the top of the pyramid and the smallest/least worrisome at the bottom. For example, they may be most worried about an upcoming school trip, then second to that is feeling overwhelmed by the idea of visiting a friend's house without a parent, and then they are worried, but less so, about asking for help from their teacher, etc.
3. Explain to your child that if we avoid the thing or things we are worried about then although our anxiety levels stay low-ish, our worries stay in control, and stop us reaching our goals.
Let your child know that if we face the things we’re worried about, we teach ourselves that they’re not actually as bad as we imagined them to be. Explain that the more we face our worries, the smaller and more manageable they will feel. It may seem as though our worries or anxiety levels will continue to rise if we face the things we’re worried about head-on, but most often, our anxiety levels will actually decrease immediately afterwards. You can show them this diagram to help them understand this concept.
4. Normalise anxiety.
It’s important to let your child know that everyone experiences anxiety – even you! Share examples of times when you’ve felt anxious, explain how it has felt in your body and how it’s made you feel emotionally. If you can, give examples of times you’ve let anxiety win and share how frustrating that’s felt, and then talk about other times where you’ve beaten anxiety and felt really good about it.
5. Share ideas about how to relieve worries.
What do you do to de-stress? Exercise? Deep breathing? Get some fresh air? Tell your child what works for you then ask them to think about what helps them to calm down or stop worrying. Write a list of ‘calm down’ ideas together – as many as possible, nothing is too silly or farfetched! This way your child has a good selection of go-to strategies to help them decrease their anxiety in the moments they experience it. You’ll use these in steps 8 and 9.
6. Ask your child about times they’ve had worries but they’ve managed to beat them.
Can your child tell you about a time they’ve not listened to their worries and/or they’ve managed to do the thing they were worried about? We’re looking for loads of examples here – you want to know how they’ve overcome their worries and how great they’ve felt afterwards. By thinking of plenty of times they’ve beaten their worries you’re helping your child to build up evidence, and confidence, that they can overcome their current anxieties.
7. Test the waters.
Now that your child can remember when they’ve overcome a problem, go back to their pyramid of worries and look at the least worrisome thing they wrote down. Can you get your child to agree to try this thing as an ‘experiment’ to see what happens? Remind them that they’ve just told you about times they’ve been able to do exactly that, and how good it’s felt in the past when they’ve beaten something that’s worried them.
8. Plan the experiment with lots of detail.
Go through the list of ‘calm down’ ideas you made with your child in step 6 and help them to decide which will be the most appropriate strategy to tackle the problem you’ll be working on (throwing stones into the sea might not always be possible before a school exam(!), however, a breathing exercise would be a great idea). Show them the anxiety peak diagram again and remind them that their anxiety will increase at first, but that it will calm down and feel more manageable almost immediately afterwards.
9. Do the experiment.
Ask your child to score their anxiety out of 10 before, during, and after the experiment and support them to use their planned and agreed ‘calm down' strategies throughout. Once they’ve completed the experiment, praise them as though they’ve just climbed Mount Kilimanjaro! If your child's anxiety rating went down during/after the experiment, be sure to let them know you noticed this and highlight that they now have some evidence they can beat their worries. If it didn't decrease, don’t panic! See steps 10 and 11.
10. Go celebrate!
Once your child has completed the experiment, no matter how it went, it’s important to celebrate – whether that’s getting an ice cream or having a little extra screen time that day. Remember, their discomfort and anxiety around the problem they just took on may not have disappeared completely, but this is normal. Your child may need to repeat the same experiment, or try a different ‘calm down' strategy, until they experience their anxiety around it decreasing enough for them to feel comfortable – your positive reinforcement will help motivate them to keep going!
11. Plan the next experiment and repeat.
Now that your child has a working strategy of how to tackle their worries and evidence that they can overcome a problem, it’s time to work up that pyramid. If their first experiment didn’t go so well, just keep repeating it and support your child to adjust their 'calm down’ strategies until it does. Once they've had success, they can work up to tackling even bigger worries until they’ve finally conquered what's at the top of their pyramid!
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