Lately, I have had several clients bring up the topic of their children feeling anxious or having anxious behaviors. Everyone wants their children to feel safe and secure. A book I really like for parents on this topic is Tamar E. Chansky’s book, Freeing Your Child from Anxiety. It gives many great ideas for working with your child, including techniques, strategies and projects to help reshape their anxiety, and yours.
Here are a few positive parenting behaviors that can help buffer stress:
Reward coping behavior by rewarding your children for taking on challenges. Recognize their partial successes. Focus on means, not ends.
Reduce anxious behavior by not responding to it excessively, with either concern or anger.
Mange your own anxiety by limiting your displays of distress. Do not introduce parents’ worries into the mix.
Develop family communication and problem-solving skills through having an “open-house” policy for positive communication and problem-solving opportunities.
Practice an authoritative/democratic parenting style where parents direct children’s behavior while valuing their independence. This is associated with lower levels of anxiety; versus, authoritarian style (where parents demand obedience, limit autonomy); or permissive style (where parents avoid any attempts to control behavior).
Connect with your child not your child’s anxiety
Rather than trying to stop the anxiety or convince the child he or she is fine, try to understand or empathize with your child’s experience in order to help your child move on from it. Stay connected by saying something like, “I understand this feels really scary right now for you. I want to help.”
*A classic paper by Ginsburg and Margaret Schlossberg of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine summarized over twenty studies of parenting factors associated with anxiety in children.
