Anxiety

 

• Click HERE to read about general strategies that may be used at home to help reduce anxiety.

 

• Click HERE to access the Complete Home Toolkit, which includes "instructions on how to help your anxious child cope with specific issues - such as back-to-school worries, dealing with nightmares, or having difficulty making friends."

 

• Talking to your child about Anxiety. Tips HERE

 

• For a variety of helpful "How-To" documents for parents, click HERE

 

Helping Your Child

 

Parents can help kids develop the skills and confidence to overcome fears so that they don't evolve into phobic reactions.

 

To help your child deal with fears and anxieties:

 

Recognize that the fear is real. As trivial as a fear may seem, it feels real to your child and it's causing him or her to feel anxious and afraid. Being able to talk about fears helps — words often take some of the power out of the negative feeling. If you talk about it, it can become less powerful.

 

Never belittle the fear as a way of forcing your child to overcome it. Saying, "Don't be ridiculous! There are no monsters in your closet!" may get your child to go to bed, but it won't make the fear go away.

 

Don't cater to fears, though. If your child doesn't like dogs, don't cross the street deliberately to avoid one. This will just reinforce that dogs should be feared and avoided. Provide support and gentle care as you approach the feared object or situation with your child.

 

Teach kids how to rate fear. A child who can visualize the intensity of the fear on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the strongest, may be able to "see" the fear as less intense than first imagined. Younger kids can think about how "full of fear" they are, with being full "up to my knees" as not so scared, "up to my stomach" as more frightened, and "up to my head" as truly petrified.

 

Teach coping strategies. Try these easy-to-implement techniques. Using you as "home base," your child can venture out toward the feared object, and then return to you for safety before venturing out again. Kids also can learn some positive self-statements (such as "I can do this" and "I will be OK") to say to themselves when feeling anxious. Relaxation techniques are helpful, including visualization (of floating on a cloud or lying on a beach, for example) and deep breathing (imagining that the lungs are balloons and letting them slowly deflate).

 

The key to resolving fears and anxieties is to overcome them. Using these suggestions, you can help your child better cope with life's situations.  (from the website http://kidshealth.org/parent/emotions/feelings/anxiety.html)