Hi, everyone. I'm Tooba khan. I'm a blogger and studied in College. And in the next
We're going to be talking about how to help your child with anxiety. Okay. So
you've got a kid with anxiety. They might struggle to go to school, or they're shy,
or maybe they're dealing with stomachaches or headaches or some other physical signs of anxiety, or maybe they throw a fit when it's time to go to bed, or they cry and they cling to you when
it's time to leave. And, you know, this breaks your heart, right? You can see them suffering, and you would do anything to help them feel better. Maybe you worry that anxiety is going to plague them for the rest of their lives, or maybe you're afraid that you gave them your crappy anxiety genes or that you made them anxious somehow. Now, I really want to emphasize it is most likely not your fault that your child is anxious. There are a lot of factors that go into it, including personality and genetics and a bunch of other things. Right? It's not your fault, but there is something you can do about it. Anxiety is absolutely treatable. Now, you probably want me to teach you skills for your child, but research shows that intervening with parents is more helpful than intervening with kids. There are literally hundreds of opportunities a week for you to show your child how to manage anxiety. So in this video series I'm going to teach you how to change your mindset around anxiety, and then in the next three
I'm going to teach you practical things you can do to help your child with anxiety. So are you on board? Are you willing to change yourself and your framework to help your kid? Awesome. Let's go. Here are four principles for helping your anxious kid.
Hey, real quick, if you'd like to learn more skills for how to relate to your emotions
I've got a bunch that could help you with your kids. One of them is How to Process Emotions,
but another one is How to Help. Another one is 30 Days to Better Relationships. Then we've got
a whole bunch of other courses that are helpful for parents and just learning new skills to deal
with your own feelings so that you can teach them to your kids. So make sure to check those out,
one: it is more effective to change parents' approach to anxiety than to teach your kids skills
or only send your child to therapy. You have 168 hours per week to interact with and influence your
children, and kids absolutely look to their parents to know how to respond to situations.
Have you ever seen when a toddler falls down? The first thing they do before they cry, before the
make a sound, is they look up and find the face of their parent, and if their parent is like,
"Oh, that's so funny," the kid might laugh or, you know, just move on. Right? And if the parent
is like, "Oh my gosh, that looked awful. Are you hurt?" the kid believes that this was a
life-threatening event, and a lot of times they'll start like crying or something. So children and
people in general, they scan the faces of the people around them to know how to interpret
events and to know whether they are safe and capable of overcoming the situations around them.
Now, to be fair, most parents aren't sure what to do with their own anxiety. No one taught us how to
have a healthy relationship with anxiety, much less how to teach our kids what to do with it.
And you know that as a parent like everything that your child feels you feel it double.
Right? If they're hurt, you hurt. If they're happy, you're happy. And if they're anxious,
you feel anxious. Many of us have been taught that it's bad to feel anxious, so we accidentally teach
our kids that feeling anxiety is dangerous or bad, that having a feeling itself, just the feeling,
is a threat. We subconsciously teach them that anxiety is dangerous. And the media is not
helpful. Right? There's so many stories out there about how bad anxiety is and how anxious kids are
and how mental health is so terrible. And I think this is a little bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy
because the more fear we have around anxiety the more problems we create around it. So we're going
to talk more about that as we go on. Um so going back to the first mindset with parents:
if your child is, let's say, nervous to go into preschool, and you worry that this is going to
be really terrible if they're anxious, so then you get really anxious and scared,
and then you hesitate to send them to preschool, you decide not to send them,
you send the message to your child that preschool must actually be a dangerous place, and they're
gonna respond by accentuating the crying and clinging behaviors because they look to you and
they see that you feel anxious about it, and then they believe that preschool is actually dangerous. So I'm not saying that you need to be like stone-cold emotionless and unfeeling with your kids. Quite the opposite. Instead, I want you to model what to do with difficult emotions. So
you could say something like, "Oh, it's hard for mommy to say goodbye too, but I know that you'll
have a great time after I leave. And I will miss you, but I know that I can see you soon. I love
you." And then the ultimate form of communication is when you confidently walk away from your child,
even if they're crying, or even if they're anxious. You demonstrate to your child that
you are absolutely confident that they are safe and that you trust that they can handle it. And
you come back and pick them up later and you say, "Oh, I'm, I knew you'd have a great time. I missed
you. And I'm so glad to see you again. I'm so proud of you for doing that hard thing." And their
confidence grows over time. Now, just to be clear, I'm going to teach you a bunch of strategies to
help them go to school and to help them calm down and to help them manage their anxiety,
but the first most important thing we talk about is your mindset. Kids look to you to
know how to respond to stimuli. You can teach them to have a healthy relationship with fear
and anxiety. So instead of teaching them to avoid anything that makes them anxious you
can teach them to have a good relationship with their emotions. Now, if you want to do therapy,
go to a therapist who teaches you how to relate to your own anxiety and gives you the skills to
support your child instead of just sending your child to school for their anxiety. One of the big
mistakes that parents make around anxiety is worrying that anxiety itself will harm their
child. We get really worried about our kids being worried, or we worry that anxiety is going to
ruin their lives. We basically are afraid of fear itself. So that takes us to number two: the second
super-important mindset to have around anxiety is that anxiety is not a negative emotion; it's just
an emotion. It happens to be an uncomfortable emotion, but it's not bad. Every emotion serves
a function. The function of anxiety is to make us ask the question, "Is this dangerous? And should I
take some action to ensure safety?" And then our body makes sure that you pay attention by giving
you these strong physical sensations. I want my kids to have occasional anxiety. I want anxiety
to give them a little nudge before crossing the street. That makes them ask, "Is it safe
to cross the street right now?" I want my kids to feel some anxiety when hiking near cliffs or when
climbing trees. I want my kids to have anxiety ask them that question so that they can make an
intentional choice about which activities are safe, which activities are risky but worth it,
and what steps they should take to ensure their safety, and then which activities they should avoid. Right? The problem is not the anxiety; it's when we label anxiety as the danger. So
instead of thinking, "Oh, it must be so awful and dangerous for my child to feel anxiety," think,
"Oh, it's okay to have feelings, but I don't have to act on them." So instead of thinking,
"I need my child to never feel anxious. I need to fix it if my child feels scared," instead of
thinking, "I need to protect them from this dangerous emotion" and thinking that anxiety
is going to hurt your child - it's not going to. Like, anxiety, a feeling itself is uncomfortable,
but it's not dangerous. Anxiety will not harm your child by itself. Now,
a bad relationship with anxiety can harm your child. And that means like avoiding anything
that makes them anxious. Yes, that will harm your child. Right? Letting anxiety make your decisions,
letting anxiety boss your children around, will interfere with their happiness. But just feeling
anxiety will not harm you. So your tendency when your kid is scared to go to sleep is to help make
that anxiety go away by letting them sleep in your bed. Or when they're anxious about meeting
new people it's to like let them avoid that: "Oh, you don't have to meet new people. Oh,
you don't have to go to that place if it makes you feel anxious." Right? But the truth is that
like avoiding anxiety and triggers actually makes anxiety worse, not better. They don't learn to be
independent, they don't learn the skills to talk with people, and that's more harmful in the long
run than a feeling. So instead, your new mindset, mindset number two, is to think, "I can handle
feeling this emotion, and so can my child." I can make space to feel this and still be okay.
So some of the things you might say - and we're going to go like a lot more into this
in the second video - are, "It's okay to feel a little nervous, honey, but you got this." "Oh,
this feels scary, huh? Sometimes I feel scared too. What what will you choose to do?"
Or to ask, "Oh, are you a little worried about what's going to happen today at the doctor's?
That's okay. Let's talk about it. So instead of saying like, "Oh, it's so terrible to feel
anxious," say, "This this is tricky. This feels uncomfortable, huh?" Or, "This looks a little
hard for you, but I'm here. We can face this together." And so what you're doing is you're
showing them that you're not scared of feelings. When you connect with them even when they're
feeling anxious instead of you personally trying to escape it by protecting them or enabling them
to avoid their feelings, you teach them that they can handle it too, because you're modeling that
you can handle your anxiety around their anxiety. When we learn to have a good relationship with our
feelings in general, when we get really good at feeling them, then a lot of times these feelings
just pass along on their merry way. It's only when we resist or suppress emotions or we give into
emotions by avoiding situations that emotions start to control our lives. Dr. Becky Kennedy
says, "I don't know any kids who grow into adults and say, 'Good thing my parents did everything
perfectly because now I never feel any anxiety ever.' No," she says, "good parents don't prevent
their kids from feeling anxiety; they teach their kids how to relate to anxiety, how to interact
with anxiety in a healthy way, in a way that gives them more choice and more power in their lives."
It teaches them a sense of self-efficacy, a belief in their own resilience. So our goal is to wire
our kids to have a resilient relationship with emotions, not to wire our kids to just get rid of
anxiety, because, one, it doesn't work, and two, it sends the message that is society is dangerous,
which it isn't; it's just uncomfortable. Okay. Now let's talk about number three.
Okay. Being sensitive is not a negative trait, but you may be thinking, "Oh, my kid is super
sensitive. They are really anxious. They are too anxious. This can't be healthy." Right?
Well, it depends on how you look at it. Kids are born with personalities. There are many types. But
some kids are born more sensitive, more anxious, more cautious. And I have a kid like that. I
probably was that kid too. Right? In our Western culture we've been programmed to believe that this
is a negative trait, that being sensitive is a bad word. But I'm gonna disagree with that.
Being sensitive is a trait, and the world needs sensitive people, people who are attuned to
others, people who notice when things are going wrong before they've gone too far, people who are
gentle and sensitive and quiet and thoughtful. Being sensitive is a gift, not a weakness. And some of the most impactful people in history have been highly sensitive, and that trait helped them
change the world for good. I'm going to give two examples: Gandhi and Einstein. Mahatma Gandhi was
a highly sensitive person. He felt the pains of his fellow Indians suffering under colonial rule,
but instead of leading like a violent revolution, he used his sensitivity and empathy to power
his non-violent resistance movement, which ultimately led to India's independence. But because he felt deeply and he empathized with other people he was able to connect with people
from all walks of life, and he inspired and motivated people to join his cause by appealing
to their emotions and their sense of morality. Okay. Albert Einstein was known for his deep
sensitivity and his emotional intelligence which allowed him to approach scientific problems from a
unique perspective. He was able to think deeply about complex issues and question traditional
assumptions in his field, and this ultimately led to groundbreaking discoveries in physics.
Einstein was also deeply empathetic, and he advocated against war and violence. His emotional
intelligence made him a really good communicator, which helped him explain complex scientific ideas
to the general public. So overall, Einstein's deep sensitivity was a crucial part of his scientific
and humanitarian achievements, and he used it to make a positive impact in the world. So being
sensitive is a personality trait, but knowing what to do with emotions is a skill that can
be learned. We're all born with tons of huge emotions, and there's no handbook. Right? But
little by little, with the right guidance, we can learn practical skills to get better at feeling.
So I'm going to challenge you to look for the gifts your deeply feeling child has. And if you
struggle to see them I want you to do your own work. Read the book Quiet or The Highly
Sensitive Person or take Dr Becky's class on deeply feeling kids. I'm also going to
invite you to consider changing how you talk about your child. So instead of describing
your child as dramatic or needy, use words like deeply feeling, intense, caring, or observant,
and just check yourself for your own biases and your own defense mechanisms. Did you by chance have to suppress your own deep feelings to survive growing up? Did you have to create walls to keep those deep feelings from surfacing? And have those walls impacted you negatively in your other relationships or in your work? Your child may have a message for you. The children we struggle with as parents are often there to teach us about our own blind spots, our own unhealed wounds. So instead of seeing them as disordered, ask the question, "What can I learn from them?" Parenting is just a wonderful opportunity to do our own work. And that takes us to the fourth point. So let's talk about the anxiety cycle real quick. Anxiety is a natural and helpful emotion
and then we avoid those situations, we actually increase our anxiety. So when we interpret a situation as potentially dangerous, like a strange dog, and then we avoid it, our brain sends out this rush of relief, as if to say, "Oh, that was close. I could have died." But our brain doesn't stop there. It then says, "Oh, let's make my human do that again so I can survive the next time." So our brain then increases our anxiety around a situation. Avoidance of things that we think maybe dangerous actually makes our anxiety grow and grow, but that's because avoidance feels good in the short term. It can feel kind of addictive, and that leads us to feeling more and more anxiety,which spirals into a situation where our world is shrinking as we avoid more and more situations.
This is the anxiety spiral. Can you see it in yourself or with your kids? A lot of people who get trapped in cycles of social avoidance and school avoidance and agoraphobia are really just trapped in a shrinking world where the more they avoid their anxiety, the less they have in their life, and then the more anxiety they have. Now, the good news is that just as the brain learns that something is dangerous when we avoid it, it can also learn that something is actually safe when we face it and survive. Our brain's inherent ability to rewire itself is called neuroplasticity. So this means that we can change the physical structure of our
way to combat anxiety is to distinguish between real and perceived danger and then to gradually face those fears instead of avoiding them. When we do this our brain learns that we're safe, and it actually decreases our anxiety levels. Just to summarize: as parents we feel double whatever our child feels, and because of that we can fall into the pattern of desperately trying to help them escape their discomfort by trying to rescue them from anxiety. But the more we rescue them from anxiety-provoking situations, the more we send the message that this is dangerous or you can't handle it on your own, and that actually wires our children's brains to be more anxious. An anxiety disorder is not a permanent trait. While being sensitive may be somewhat hardwired, generalized anxiety is not a purely genetic trait. It's a scale. It's not an on/off switch. Like, you can learn the skills to turn the volume down on anxiety so that it no longer runs your child's
life. You and your child can actually be highly functional, successful, and happy, even if you're highly sensitive. So just to summarize: the most effective way to help kids with anxiety is to help parents develop a new framework because they model for the kids 168 hours a week how to relate to emotions. Kids look to parents to know how to respond to stimuli. We can model to them that they can handle the challenges they face, like school and public situations and bedtimes. And it can be helpful here to have a mantra like, "Oh, we can do hard things." Number two: anxiety is not a bad emotion. It's just a messenger asking us to consider whether something is safe and to carefully choose our actions. So use words like "tricky" or "difficult" or "uncomfortable" instead of "bad" or "terrible." Number three: being anxious or sensitive is not a negative trait, so look for your child's gifts and acknowledge them. Number four: avoiding anxiety-inducing situations actually makes anxiety worse. It's, instead it's our job as parents to help our kids develop confidence in their ability to face their fears. So we just have to have a new mindset, something like this: It's okay to feel anxious, but we can choose our actions.
In the next three videos we're going to move into some really practical skills you can use to help your kids work through anxiety and actually decrease it over time. So make sure to stay tuned.
how to help their kids with anxiety. So if you'd like to learn more, make sure to check that out.
Okay. Hope that's helpful. Thank you for watching, and take care.
