Dealing with the Anxious Child
Dealing with the Anxious Child
Anxiety is a natural emotion which is adaptive, for example: you smell smoke in your house, become afraid, and run out. Everyone gets anxious, the difference with pathological anxiety is the DEGREE of anxiety experienced, and the person becomes more EASILY anxious, more OFTEN, and more INTENSELY.
Anxiety can arise from two general causes. Genetics can give rise to an anxious person and more prone to anxiety and depression. Secondly, anxiety can be a learnt response, either directly from others, or more subtly through observation/modeling, or through previous negative experiences.
Common strategies parents use to manage anxiety are
1. Providing excessive reassurance
This is a very common approach with many parents often offering their anxious child frequent verbal reassurance and/or physical affection and closeness. Children in general do need this from their parents, but the danger of this approach with anxious personalities is that they are not able to rely on themselves and will thus seek reassurance more often from others. This creates a vicious cycle. It teaches an anxious child that they cannot handle the situation themselves and they need you to handle it. Reassurance also equals positive attention from a parent, so in fact the anxiety is actually being rewarded.
2. Being too directive
Parents watch their anxious child feeling helpless and try to take over and direct the child, that is, tell the child exactly what to do, how to behave, what to say, or they do things on behalf of the child. This also reduces fear but parents are not helping the child to learn what to do in the situation. Reliance on parent direction is actually a form of avoidance, as long as a child has a parent to take over the anxious situation for them; they do not have to face the fear of it themselves.
3. Permitting/encouraging avoidance
Sometimes parents are at a loss of how to manage anxious situations and end up allowing their child to avoid the fearful situation. Avoidance may not be so detrimental if it is allowed occasionally, but if it becomes a habit, it has long term consequences.
4. Impatience/frustration
It is very easy, for parents to become frustrated and angry, especially if they are feeling helpless. However this makes the child more afraid and dependent
It is imperative for parents to be equipped with appropriate management techniques that they can use.
Here are some affective management techniques:
1. Communication about feelings
It is useful for parents and their children to evaluate fears and or fearful situations together. Focus on how people feel in different situations; use yourself or other family members as examples. Illustrate that sometimes situations can be fun and enjoyable; others can make you nervous or scared. Teach your child to name some different feelings, as well as intensity of feelings, for example nervous, scared, and petrified. Besides describing in words how one feels it is also possible to tell how someone is feeling through facial
expressions and body language. Introduce the idea that things happen in our bodies too when we get nervous or scared. Children can then talk about parts of their bodies that feel strange when they are scared or nervous. Recognizing that your body gets tense and that you are worried is the first step in coping with scary situations.
2. The link between thoughts and feelings
Another important thing to learn is that there is a relationship between situations, our thoughts and our feelings.
When we are faced with a situation we have all sorts of thoughts, these are called ‘self talk’. It is our thoughts about situations that lead to how we feel about them, not the situation itself.
Anxious kids have worrisome thoughts, they always expect the worst and they think that there is nothing that they can do about it. Parents can assist their anxious children by helping them became more aware of their self talk and to see that sometimes people can have more than one thought about the same thing. Some thoughts can help people deal with situations; other thoughts might make people feel scared.
3. Coping with worrying thoughts – teaching your child to think realistically
Once you have introduced the relationship between events, thoughts and emotional response to your child it becomes easier to see then that when your thoughts about a situation change, your emotions will too. Anxiety results in two ways of thinking – overestimating how likely it is that something unpleasant might happen, and overestimating how bad the consequences will be if it does happen.
Thinking realistically involves:-
•Identifying the thought behind the emotion (What is making me feel this way? Why am I worried?
What is it about this situation that is making me worried?)
•Looking for the evidence for the thought. One way of explaining this to children is through the
analogy of a detective.
•Discuss and list alternative possibilities.
•Ask yourself what is the worst thing that could happen?
4. Appropriate coping behaviour
Anxious children act in a way that keeps the anxiety going, the main way they do this is to avoid the situation that makes them feel anxious. Besides learning to think more positively and realistically, children should be taught not to avoid anxiety-provoking situations. NEED TO FACE FEAR IN ORDER TO FIGHT IT.
A child needs to face fear, and stay long enough in the feared situation in order to learn that nothing bad will happen to them. Anxious children avoid situations because they believe that something bad will happen to them. By avoiding they never put the feared situation to the test and give themselves the opportunity to learn that nothing bad will happen to them.
There are some key principles parents should keep in mind:
•Parents should work together with the child to generate a range of feared situations from lessor to greater. Situations must be practical, something that the child is likely to encounter in the immediate future.
•Each situation is experienced until it no longer provokes excessive fear. The child must stay in the feared situation as ‘long enough’ as they take to learn that nothing bad happened.
•Repetition is critical. The child must go into their feared situation over and over, simply doing it once will not remove the fear.
•Progress will not be smooth, there will be good days and bad days, on bad days it is best not to
attempt big steps but to repeat a lower step.
•Consistency of rewards is important. Reward for facing fear must be given as soon as possible.
Terms of agreement must be adhered to strictly, if the child does not attempt the feared situation, do not give the reward.
The techniques described above encourage independence in the anxious child as well as assist with understanding emotions and appropriate coping mechanisms. When parents couple this with a consistent approach of open communication of feelings, rewards and praise they provide the most effective support structures for anxiety to be reduced.
[Claudette Jordan – Counselling Psychologist Tel : 031 266 9382]
