Three Mistakes Parents Make With Anxious Children

As a parent of a child with anxiety, you want your child to be happy and feel better.  What you don’t want to do is make things worse. Unfortunately, even parents with the best intentions tend to make mistakes when dealing with their anxious child.

When your child approaches you with countless “What if” questions or a list of worries, it is natural to want to reassure him. You want to comfort your child and make the worry go away. Unfortunately, this seemingly effective strategy may actually backfire. Constant and excessive reassurance can convince your child that his anxiety is valid and appropriate. In fact, your child may see your reassurance as a sort of reward for his anxiety. He may grow to love the attention and affection he gets every time his anxiety kicks in creating a vicious circle.

The second mistake parents make when dealing with an anxious child is enabling their child’s anxiety. Helping your child avoid the things that cause her anxiety may seem like a loving, protective gesture but you are only perpetuating her anxiety. Your child will come to rely on you when anxiety creeps up and will not learn how to face it on her own. It is normal to want to help your child when she is anxious but you are doing more harm than good when you continue to intervene.

The third mistake is about allowing your emotions to get involved. Having a child with anxiety can be frustrating and exhausting. Your child’s constant worry may wear you down and you may be tempted to argue with your child or try to inject logic into the conversation. As you may already know, this is not an effective strategy. Snapping at your child will only reinforce his anxiety and may even worsen it. If you feel like you are about to boil over, take a deep breath or count to ten. Additionally, children don’t practice logic or rational thinking when they are anxious. In fact, they are unable to. Their anxiety actually shuts down their rational thinking so there is no sense in trying to argue with an anxious child.

While it’s easy to fall into these traps, chances are, you’re doing everything you can to help your child. The most important thing you can do is give your child the skills and confidence to become self-reliant so he can confront and control his anxiety on his own.

Chris Nicoletti is a contributing writer for Mental Health News and www.GoZen.com