How to Support Your Child Through Anxiety

It often starts small, a sudden hesitation to hangout with friends, a stomach ache before school, sleepless nights before an event. At first, you might chalk it up to nerves or just a phase. But when anxiety begins to take the driver’s seat in your child’s life, it can leave you feeling helpless in the passenger seat. If you’ve ever watched your child or teen wrestle with anxiety, you know how quickly it can turn the simplest moments into overwhelming ones. Whether it shows up as feeling panicked before a game or quiet withdrawal from others, anxiety has a way of sneaking in and stealing peace from both kids and their parents. The good news is you don’t have to just stand by and watch. Parents can be a significant resource to help teens and kids develop more understanding about anxiety and ways to be resilient through it. Here are three tips to get you started:

Zero Anxiety is not the Goal - Anxiety is an emotion we all experience at times and we actually need to help us stay safe. Our emotions are not meant to be silenced or ignored, but instead to be used as clues to figure out what our hopes, desires, and needs are. So help your child get curious about their anxiousness and other emotions. You could sit quietly with them until they are ready to talk about how they are feeling or model this for them by saying out loud how emotions, even anxiety, helps you to navigate decisions. For example, “I’m feeling anxious right now, I think it is because this is really important to me.” Anxiety is an emotion to be welcomed and intrigued by because it exists to help you. However, if you see anxiety or other emotions as a problem and put your attention into trying to stop or get away from feeling them the emotion usually intensifies. If you want anxiety to reduce, try letting the emotion be there, ask questions about when and why it started (it is ok if they don’t know), and figure out what your child’s desires and needs are.

Avoidance Often Increases Anxiety - Think of all the ways kids and teens have to avoid the anxious feelings they might experience. I hear from many kids and especially teens, they just look at their phone or tablet when they feel anxious. While on the surface this doesn’t seem like a big deal, however overtime this is likely rewiring their brain to avoid feeling anxious, bored, sad, and many other emotions. It reinforces the idea that emotions are something to get away from instead of something to be curious about. So fast forward to a moment when your child can’t get away from their feelings of anxiousness or sadness, they might quickly run out of capacity or tolerance for their emotions because they have not been training or preparing for them. A great way to help your child build their capacity for anxiety is to encourage them to take steps towards doing what they are feeling anxious about, if you feel it is safe for them to do. This could be ordering for themself at a restaurant or talking to a new classmate, as they experience doing what they feel anxious about they learn from their own experience that their fear is not likely to happen and they are capable of doing difficult things.

Increase Resiliency - Help your child understand what leads to anxiety, the research here might surprise you. Did you know that teens spend an average of 6-9 hours on screens a day with 5 hours of this being on social media. Teens who use screens more than 4 hours a day have higher rates of anxiety and depression. While I know this is only one factor that can increase anxiety I encourage you to consider how the use of screens could be impacting your child or teen. Could your child’s screen habits be leading to anxiety by perpetuating a lack of sleep, sunlight, and social connection? If your child’s brain is not getting what it needs to thrive your child is much more likely to have difficulty regulating emotions and being resilient. If anxiety has become an ongoing obstacle for your child to enjoy life or accomplish tasks, contacting a therapist is likely a good next step. Therapy can help your child to understand the complexities of the specific anxiety they are experiencing and help increase resiliency. However, therapy works best to proactively build resiliency skills in your child to help them to prepare for difficult moments ahead so don’t wait until your child is really struggling with intense anxiety to seek out therapy or mental health resources. Follow us on Facebook and Instagram for more tips on understanding anxiety and building resiliency.

Written by: Jennifer Wilmoth, LMFT

Zablotsky B, Arockiaraj B, Haile G, Ng AE. Daily screen time among teenagers: United States, July 2021–December 2023. NCHS Data Brief, no 513. Hyattsville, MD: National Center for Health Statistics. 2024. DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.15620/cdc/168509

Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (Penguin Press, 2024).