Child Anxiety Treatment
No one wants their child to go through life fearful and anxious. Unfortunately, if a child doesn’t learn how to handle anxiety effectively while they are growing up they are very likely to have life-long issues. That’s why appropriate child anxiety treatment is so important.
Kids have trouble holding emotions in so their emotions often get acted out in behavior. Exactly how it gets acted out varies from child to child. When anxiety strikes, one child might become aggressive while another becomes depressed and a third looks to their parents for approval.
Part of growing up is learning to manage personal or social situations that may generate anxiety. If you think your child has behavior triggered by anxiety, part of your job as a parent is to coach them on how they can handle anxiety appropriately without acting out or suppressing their emotions. It’s an important job. Here are some tips to help.
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Coach younger kids using pictures
Young children don’t think abstractly. The abstract concept of being “nervous” or “anxious” doesn’t have much meaning for them. However, from infancy all kids become expert at identifying facial expressions and their probable emotional associations. Because of this, you can use pictures in a book or magazine to help young children become more expert at dealing with emotions.
For example, you could look at a picture of a happy child and ask questions like “How do you think that boy feels?”, “Why do you think he feels that way?” “What do you think he’s thinking?.” You can also give your own answers to these questions and have fun making up stories with your child.
Then you could look at a picture of a child that looks worried or afraid and ask similar questions. If you ask your child why the child in the picture looks worried it’s possible that they may answer with something they’re afraid of. Even if they don’t, you can ask a follow up question about what might help the child or how they could deal with their the problem causing the fear. After your child answers, or if they don’t, you could tell them some ways of acting that you think might be helpful. Perhaps you could say something like “Well if I was that boy and I was worried about kids picking on me at school, I think I’d remind myself that no one has the right to pick on someone else and that their behavior says more about them than me. I also think I’d talk to Mom and Dad about it.”
Teach Positive Self Talk and Explanatory Style
We all have an inner dialog going on almost all the time. People often call it self talk. It’s the internal running commentary we have about our self and the events of our life. In general, it can be positive or negative. If something undesirable happens, negative self talk would say something like “Nothing works out for me” or “This is the worst thing ever.” Positive self talk would be something like “It’s not that big a deal” “I can handle this” “It will be alright”
I think you can see how negative self talk would aggravate anxiety and positive self talk can alleviate it.
In the same way that you teach children how to talk to other people, teach them how to talk to themselves. Phrases like “I can handle it” are a very powerful way to build confidence and avoid anxiety.
Rehearsing and Role Playing
Children learn by practicing. If you watch, you’ll often find kids talking to themselves about something that happened or role playing with a friend. You can coach a child about how to react in a given situation and have them role play. For example, you might ask them to pretend they’re nervous before a test. You could have them practice taking slow deep breaths and telling themselves things like “It’ll be OK. It’s only a test. The important thing is that I do the best I can. I can handle this.”
Get Input From Other Adults
As a parent, it’s difficult for us to be objective about our children. Also, as they grow more and more of their life takes place away from home. For these reasons it’s a good idea to get input from other adults who have a chance to interact with or observe your child.
The child’s teacher is one good person to talk with. You can ask if your child seems nervous to the teacher and how they seem to handle the normal give and take at school.
You can also talk with the parents of kids that your child spends time with and plays with. They often will be able to offer insights into your child’s behavior that you haven’t noticed yourself.
All of this will help you decide if there’s a problem and if so what might be triggering it. If there is a problem, the next question is what to do about. Many times, the suggestions you’ve just read will be enough. However if they aren’t you definitely want to seek additional help because the situation will only get worse with time. Your child’s well-being is definitely at stake. I highly recommend taking a look at the Anxiety Free Child program. this program has helped thousands of parents help their children and may be just the answer you’re looking for. Click here to learn more. You could begin helping your child free themselves from excessive anxiety today.
Tags: child anxiety, child anxiety treatment, childhood anxiety disorder, help a child with anxiety