Kids & Anxiety: Advice From An Educational Psychologist

It’s natural for children to express fear about new experiences especially when the activity involves being away from home and family. Anxiety at summer camp, for instance, can keep your child from forming new friendships or participating in fun activities. If your child is anxiously anticipating any new experience, there are concrete ways you can help your child prepare and then cope once they are in the new situation.

Symptoms of anxiety: 

If your child has just one or two symptoms or if the symptoms only pop up around new situations, a conversation and some help developing coping skills will probably suffice. Keep in mind, though, that continued persistent anxiety requires professional diagnosis and the help of an outside expert. Symptoms of anxiety include:

•  Recurrent excessive distress when separation from home or major attachment figures occurs (or is anticipated).
• Persistent, excessive worry about losing major attachment figures (or something harmful happening to them).
• Persistent and excessive worry that something traumatic will lead to separation from a major attachment figure (e.g., being kidnapped).
• Persistent reluctance or refusal to go to school or other places because of fear of separation.
• Persistent or excessive fear or reluctance to be alone or without major attachment figures at home or in other settings.
• Persistent reluctance or refusal to go to sleep without being near a major attachment figure (or to sleep away from home).
• Repeated nightmares involving separation.
• Repeated complaints of physical symptoms (e.g. headaches, stomachaches, vomiting) when separated from major attachment figures (or separation is anticipated).

Ten tips for parents on helping an anxious child (modified from Childmind.org)

1. The goal isn’t to eliminate anxiety, but to help a child manage it. None of us wants to see our child unhappy, but the best way to help kids overcome anxiety isn’t to try to remove stressors that trigger it. It’s to help them learn to tolerate their anxiety and function even when they’re anxious. As a byproduct of that, the anxiety will decrease or fall away over time.
2. Don’t avoid things just because they make a child anxious. Helping children avoid the things they are afraid of will make them feel better in the short term, but it reinforces the anxiety over the long run.  Parents swooping in to remove a child from a scary situation reinforces that there is something to fear and the child can quickly learn to use avoidance as a coping mechanism.
3. Express positive—but realistic—expectations. You can’t promise a child that her fears are unrealistic—that she’ll have fun every day of summer camp, for instance. But you can express confidence that she’s going to be okay, she will be able to manage it, and that, as she faces her fears, the anxiety level will drop over time. 
4. Respect your child’s feelings, but don’t empower them. It’s important to understand that validation doesn’t always mean agreement. If a child is terrified of going to the doctor because she’s due for a shot, you don’t want to belittle her fears, but you also don’t want to amplify them. The message you want to send is, “I know you’re scared, and that’s okay, and I’m here, and I’m going to help you get through this.”
5. Don’t ask leading questions. Encourage your child to talk about her feelings, but try not to ask leading questions like “Are you anxious about the big test?” To avoid feeding the cycle of anxiety, just ask open-ended questions: “How do you feel about the science fair?”
6. Don’t reinforce the child’s fears. What you don’t want to do is be saying, with your tone of voice or body language: “Maybe this is something that you should be afraid of.” Let’s say a child has had a negative experience with a dog. Next time she’s around a dog, you might be anxious about how she will respond, and you might unintentionally send a message that she should be worried.
7. Encourage the child to tolerate her anxiety. Let your child know that you appreciate the work it takes to tolerate anxiety to do what she wants or needs to do. It’s encouraging her to engage in life and to let the anxiety take its natural curve. We call it the “habituation curve”—it will drop over time as she continues to have contact with the stressor. 
8. Try to keep the anticipatory period short. When we’re afraid of something, the hardest time is before we do it. So another rule of thumb for parents is to eliminate or reduce the anticipatory period. Try to shorten that period to a minimum.
9. Think things through with the child. Sometimes it helps to talk through what would happen if a child’s fear came true—how would she handle it? A child who’s anxious about separating from her parents might worry about what would happen if they didn’t come to pick her up. So we talk about that. If your mom doesn’t come at the end of soccer practice, what would you do? “Well, I would tell the coach my mom’s not here.” And what do you think the coach would do? “He would call my mom. Or he would wait with me.” For some kids, having a plan is a healthy way to reduce the uncertainty.
10. Try to model healthy ways of handling anxiety. There are multiple ways you can help kids handle anxiety by letting them see how you cope with anxiety yourself. Don’t pretend that you don’t have stress and anxiety, but let kids hear or see you managing it calmly and then feeling positive about getting through it.

Dr. Kathryn Keithly is a Licensed Educational Psychologist, Board Certified Sport Psychologist, and Cognitive Learning Specialist in Aptos. Carol Murphy, MA, CCC-SLP is a Licensed Speech-Language Pathologist, Board Certified Educational Therapist and Learning Disability Specialist. Check www.kmkpsych.com for additional information or call 831-234-4182.