Light Lessons Blog with Patsie McCandless: How to Deal with Childhood Anxiety

How to Deal with Childhood Anxiety

Parents can learn and practice how to effectively deal with your child’s anxiety. It all takes place in rationally challenging your child’s perceptions of worry or threat –  and replacing negative thinking patterns with positive habit energy.

That may sound too simplistic, but it is a truth universally acknowledged (to borrow from Jane Austen), that human beings create the habits that run their lives.

Therefore, you can create new habits to run your life happy and healthy.

Positive Thinking Patterns Deal with Childhood Anxiety

Here are positive thinking patterns to help:

  • Listen: to your child’s worries and concerns; let them know you hear them
  • Do not begin with passing their worries off as imaginary; don’t dismiss their feelings.
  • encourage learning about anxiety itself; see my Blog: Anxiety in Your Body
  • know important facts about anxiety:
  • changes in emotions are normal;
  • worrying only increases anxiety;
  • false alarms are common (Use the example of the drama in news and social media, and how the stories you see actually – really and truly – do not affect your child.)
  • Limit and prevent children’s exposure to news of disasters and catastrophic events; protect your child from information that magnifies anxiety with the implications of imminent threat.
  • Allow time for connections – family and social. Anxiety results when children do not feel safe. Connections with parents, family members, peers, and teachers—are natural remedies to worry and anxiety. (This does not mean over-protection or helicopter parenting.)
  • Promote play and physical activity. Play and exercise dispel the physical tensions that worry and anxiety generate. Schedule frequent and consistent times for your child’s independent recreation. This lets children know that they can manage and control their own habit energy to regulate their own feelings and reactions.
  • Teach yourself and your child deep breathing, which calms the worry or panic.

            In Becoming Jesse and its sequel – The Secrets of Windy Hill – Jesse practices this with his THINK: “If you are facing something gruff and rough, you can always stop and do your

T-H-I-N-K. Remember?

T: Take a deep breath.

H: Hold yourself high.

I: Imagine how you really want to feel … right …

N: Now. And finally …

K: Know: All is well.

Do you feel it, Jesse? The stillness. The calm. Look for it.

More Ideas to Deal with Childhood Anxiety

Stay POSITIVE and help your child stay POSITIVE with things to say – or not to say – when facing an anxious situation.

  • Don’t dismiss or belittle children’s concerns. If they’re worrying about something, itissomething to worry about.
  • Don’t try to talk children out of their concerns—without showing them how to do it.
  • Similarly, don’t tell them to calm down; instead, show them how to calm down, as in Jesse’s T-H-I-N-K, above. When children learn to deep breathe in their habit-energy, it immediately prompts what is called the ‘parasympathetic nerve’ in your brain, to quiet the physical symptoms of anxiety.
  • Other calming techniques, especially for younger children:                                                             – blow out the ‘candles’ of their fingertips;                                                                                         – blow bubbles                                                                                                                               (NOTE: blowing out means you have to breathe in – which means more oxygen for your body.)
  • Re-set yourself – physically and emotionally. Pivot – actually spin yourself around – from the negative feeling to the positive. (This works really well when you pivot TO a window or glass door; the outside world tends to re-set your inner world more easily.)
  • Keep your own anxieties to yourself. Do not share them with your children.
  • On the other hand, children want to know they are not alone. Sometimes hearing a story from an admired grown-up or older child can make all the difference.

Story:

My husband’s soccer team was nervous, preparing to try out for the Field Day teams. He invited a local high school soccer player to visit and talk to them.  I got to watch the young man, as he told them:

How nervous I was before my try-out! But all my teammates cheered me on. So I cheered myself on! He laughed, I didn’t make the team the first year. But it wasn’t the end of the world! Actually, that gave me time to practice and get really good! He gestured with his arms up in the air, It all worked out – just right!

I visibly saw the children smile and relax.

Once children see that other human beings have come up with a way to successfully manage their nervous worry and anxiety, perhaps they can do it too.

  • As in the above story, help yourself and your children to know that the discomfort felt with worry or anxiety will not wreck, ruin or shatter you or them. It doesn’t feel good. But every human being has the power to change that thought. You are in charge – like a Super Hero!

ALL in ALL in Dealing with Childhood Anxiety:

Make new habits:

  • practice deep breathing
  • ask yourself – Is this real or am I just imagining this?
  • positive self-talk
  • reset yourself before your anxiety increases.

… because you are the one who can decrease your anxiety.

Change

Life changes. And we know that life isn’t always calm and easy-please-y. It never has been.

But what has changed is that we are aware that the human beings – the earthlings – who succeed in life have the habit energy of knowing how to find the calm and smooth. They know how to reduce anxiety and distress and shift their thoughts to the positive. To feel your best… and do your best.

It isn’t Life that determines our lot here on earth, it is our reaction to Life. You always get to choose how you react – to any situation… always with your…

LIGHT ON!