When Helping Your Anxious Child Keeps Anxiety Going
Here’s a common scenario that many of you will be familiar with.
A child is nervous about giving a presentation at school.
They tell their parents they are worried.
The parents start thinking about how to make the situation easier.
Could they present only to the teacher?
Could they record it at home?
Could they avoid the presentation?
The child might feel better.
Perhaps the anxiety settles.
Then, a few months later, another presentation comes up.
And the same worry returns.
This pattern appears often.
Parents want to help. They are watching their child experience something uncomfortable and they want to reduce that discomfort.
The difficulty is that children learn from these moments.
When a child feels anxious and completes the presentation, they discover that anxiety can be present while they continue with the task.
They may notice that the feeling changes.
They may learn that they can cope.
This is how confidence grows.
When anxiety leads to avoiding the situation each time, children can start to learn that anxiety needs to be removed before they can continue.
The feeling itself becomes a reason to stop.
This pattern appears in many areas of childhood.
A teenager feels nervous about speaking to new people.
A child makes a mistake and wants to give up.
A young person avoids something they would like to do because of how they might feel.
These moments are difficult for parents because the instinct to help is strong.
The challenge is recognising when support is helping a child move through anxiety and when the response is helping the child move away from situations that create anxiety.
Many parents ask what they should say when their child is worried.
The words are often less important than the response.
A child needs to know their feelings are understood.
They also need experiences where they discover that difficult feelings can pass while they continue with life.
This is where boundaries become important.
Children need parents who can acknowledge the anxiety while still holding the expectation that they can do difficult things.
Learning how to set and frame these boundaries is one of the hardest parts of parenting an anxious child.
If you would like to understand your child’s anxiety better, my course Making Sense of Anxious Children explains how anxiety develops, why some common parenting responses can accidentally keep anxiety going, and how parents can respond differently in everyday situations.
You can learn more about the course here.
