How To Help Your Anxious Child

Welcome to Mom On Purpose, where it’s all about helping moms overcome challenges and live their best lives. My hope is by being here, you are more inspired to become the mom you are made to be. I’m Natalie, your host, a wife, boy, mom, dog, mama, Chicagoan, and former lawyer turned professionally certified coach. If you’re here to grow, I can help. Let’s go.

Hello, my beautiful friends. How we doing today? Wrapping up summer, heading into the new school year and fall, and just this time of transitions. And many of you may be struggling with how to help your anxious child, and that is exactly what I’m going to talk with you about today. This is something I teach and coach on very differently than what you might be used to hearing. And I think just knowing that can be really empowering because it’s a different approach.

My clients find it extraordinarily helpful. If you want more tools after you listen to this, I definitely recommend getting inside the Mom On Purpose membership over at momonpurpose.com/coaching because you will equip yourself with much deeper tools than you can get on this podcast that will help you parent better and feel more confident and help your kids navigate their challenges among lots of other things. So if you are looking for more tools, join me inside the membership. It is absolutely the best time of year to join. Now let’s dive in to what I have going on for you today, which is giving you some steps to help your anxious child. The new school year is a time where we’re feeling lots of, mixed emotions and that is layered on top of the emotions that our kids are feeling about transitioning from summer into fall.

Many of you have school aged kids, and I think even without having school aged kids, there’s this sense of a new beginning. I always think of the fall as like another New Year’s. I love celebrating New Year’s in January, of course, but the fall I think of is very similar, where we’re starting to get into new routines, new habits, new systems, wanting to make our lives that much better. And because of that, I thought this episode would be really timely. And I want to talk about it through the lens of helping your anxious child because this can make all of those wonderful parts of this time of year that much harder. If your child is feeling anxious about friends, about a new school, about teachers, about whatever it is going on in their life, I can offer you some specific steps. I have four here to really help you help them. Number four I would say is the most important. So make sure you listen to this all the way through. Um, but I need to go through all of the first three, four, number four to really make sense. So let’s dive in.

Number one is to normalize your child’s feeling of anxiety. Now I’m talking about the normal feeling of anxiety that we all experience as human beings. Did you know that it is normal to feel the feeling of anxiety? I am not talking about a chemical imbalance. I’m not talking about being diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder. I am talking about the normal feelings that we experience as adults and as kids of fear of the unknown in the future. That’s all anxiety is. And there is nothing wrong with feeling this emotion, with feeling anxiety. Anxiety is an emotion. We all, as humans create with how we’re thinking about something.

We are afraid of something that’s in the future that’s unknown to us. We all do this with healthy human brains. And I think that because of the way that our media is, we have made all anxiety really bad. And I don’t think it’s mal intent. I just think that because there are deeper layers to this, there are, people who need extra help with, a physician, with a psychiatrist, with generalized anxiety disorder. And those are tools that we have available. Thank goodness I’m a huge fan of all of those tools, whatever tools work, honestly. But because usually that’s the lens through which anxiety is talked about, I think a huge portion of people experiencing anxiety is missed. And that is the portion of the people like myself who just feels anxious from time to time as a normal part of the human experience.

So that’s where I want you to start. Assuming that that’s what your child is experiencing. They are experiencing uncertainty about an unknown future, and they’re feeling anxious. Normalize that you are giving them such a gift. Tell them that it’s okay, that they’re feeling anxious, that it’s part of being a human being, that it’s something that comes from our brains and we all have this part of us, even you as mom. So I like to talk about the top feelings that I experience throughout the day, and I often include negative emotions in that just to normalize feeling negative emotion so that it doesn’t seem like, oh, mom is happy all of the time and and that means she’s good and therefore I should be happy all the time. And that means I’m good. That’s not the case because that is not the human experience. The human experience is full of disappointment and frustration and sadness and anxiety. So step number one is just to normalize the feeling of anxiety for your child.

Step number two is to help your child process the anxiety. So on default, the tendency with anxiety is to avoid it or try to fix it. So you might try to get your child to feel better. For example, they’re feeling anxious and you want to help them fix whatever it is that is causing their anxiety. But the truth is that it’s not your job to fix the anxiety for them. Your job is to help them be with the feeling so that they can process it. I like to say sit, don’t solve. Sit with them in the feeling of anxiety. Don’t try to solve it. This my friend, is so doable. Their body knows what to do. Your body knows what to do. It’s when we resist it, when we think, oh no, this shouldn’t be happening.

Something’s gone wrong, that we make the anxiety worse. And that’s what can ultimately lead to panic attacks. But when you go inward and you allow yourself to process the feeling, then it will move through you. The more that you do this, the easier it will be to help your child. So if you are not familiar with processing your own anxiety or your own negative emotions, it’s just a lot harder to teach. If you’re used to grabbing a glass of wine when you feel stressed, if you’re used to scrolling social media or shopping on Amazon, when you feel worried to get your mind off of it, that is escaping negative emotion. And so it’s gonna be really hard to help your child process their anxiety if you are not skilled at that process either. And so the first part of that is just you learning how to process negative emotion.

And this is something that I teach inside the Mom On Purpose membership, and I Feelings course it is one of my favorite courses inside the platform because I teach you how to process feelings yourself and then you can help your kids. It’s totally worth the entire monthly membership of the, fee that is associated with Mom On Purpose. And you will find so much more in there to help you with this. So definitely recommend that if you’re not comfortable processing your own emotions. Once you’re comfortable processing your own emotions, you’ll pick up on the details and the intricacies that come along with processing emotions come along with just being still and taking deep breaths and naming the emotion and, separating yourself from the emotion so that you are not anxiety. It’s not I am anxious, it’s not my kid is anxious, it’s, I feel anxious, or my child is feeling anxious. When you add that feeling word, it creates separation between identity and feelings, which is so important because you, my friend, are not an anxious human being. Your child is not an anxious child. Your child is a good whole amazing human being who is feeling anxiety. That separation is so important because then you get leverage over the feeling. Then you see, oh, this is just how I’m experiencing this feeling. This is what my brain is doing. It’s creating all of these thoughts can validate those thoughts and feelings and just allow them so that your body processes them without needing to avoid them, without needing to eat your feelings, without needing to resist them, which will ultimately just make it worse. So step number two is to help your child process the anxiety.

Step number three is to focus on your child’s thoughts, not on taking actions. It is so tempting to want to help your child take different actions, but this will focus externally, which isn’t the root cause of anxiety. So when you say try this, or what about that, you are teaching your child to look outward, to change their circumstances, to fix an internal feeling.

Remember, anxiety is caused in the brain. It’s a feeling caused by thoughts. Thoughts create feelings. Anxiety is a feeling. The way that you think about something creates anxiety. So when you, you know, offer them suggestions to get familiar with their new teacher or their new school or make friends in a different way, when you’re offering actions, it teaches them to look outward, to change the circumstance, to feel better. There’s so many problems with this, but primarily we can’t always change our circumstances. And increasing your emotional capacity to feel feelings is so much more empowering because what happens when you change a circumstance is the only way you feel better is if you also change your thoughts along with it. Because thoughts create feelings. Everyone interprets going back to school or transitioning into fall differently. You know this, if you have multiple children, one of them might be feeling anxious about the new school year while another one isn’t.

Another one’s excited or another one’s sad. Whatever it is, it’s all dependent on the way that their brain is interpreting the circumstance and none of it is right or wrong, it’s just the way that they are, making meaning out of what’s happening. And you can support them by helping them look inward at what they are thinking. So how do you do this? You ask your child questions about what they are thinking that’s causing their anxiety. Get really curious. Get curious about them. Get curious about their brain. Get curious about their body. Like you could ask them questions about where they feel anxiety and give them examples of where you feel it ask really, helpful, useful questions that focus inward on their experience so that you’re genuinely sitting with them in it. You’re not trying to fix it. You’re not sending the message that, oh no, something’s gone wrong.

This is terribly bad. You’re normalizing it. You are helping them process the feeling and you’re focusing on what they are thinking. And then you’re listening. After you’ve done all that as part of step three, you can kind of thought drop as I call it, but you want to make sure that you hear them out first and you want to make sure that they process the feeling first. So what I mean by thought drop is you might offer them more empowering thoughts. So for example, let’s say your child is starting school at a new school and they’re feeling really anxious about making new friends at this new school, and they keep thinking thoughts like, what if I don’t make new friends? No one’s gonna like me. I’m really scared. I don’t think that I’m gonna fit in. And you’re just asking them questions and they’re telling you all of this, and you’re listening and you’re asking things like, oh, what would make you think that You’re not dismissing it, you’re not invalidating it.

Like, oh, I’m sure that won’t happen. That’s never gonna happen. Instead, you might share a story where you struggled with friends and how you overcame it not to tell them that this won’t happen because their brain thinks whatever might happen is very real. And so you just want to show them that even if it is real, they will be able to work through it. So thought dropping is where after you’ve heard them out, after you hear their concerns, after you’ve maybe shared your stories and validated them, you might say, well, is there another way to think about it? Or something that really helps me when I’m feeling nervous about starting something new. Maybe it’s a new job. Or, if you just moved to a new city and you also are trying to make new friends, is, you know, sharing the thoughts that you work on.

Maybe you say something like, for me, what helps mom is to think that I’m my own best friend and there are always more people out there that I can meet to make friends with. So it’s okay if it’s hard to make friends at first something where you are adding in some empowering thoughts that acknowledge their real concerns while also helping them move forward. But again, it really matters to go in this order. So you don’t wanna do that right away when you notice that they’re feeling anxious. First you wanna normalize the feeling, then you wanna help them process the feeling instead of trying to fix it. Then you want to get curious and ask questions about their thoughts so you can really get the specific thoughts that they’re thinking, not focusing on fixing it, not focusing on taking actions. Once you’re curious about them, you understand their thoughts, you’ve shown that you respect them, that you hear them, that you’re listening to them, that you care about their experience, then you might add in some of those empowering, what I would call, you know, helpful, supportive thoughts as alternatives.

And you’re not sitting there thinking or or saying to them, you know, did you get it? Are you gonna think this, this is, this is a better way to think. You’re just offering it to them. I do this often with my oldest and he doesn’t ever say anything and that’s what I expect, but I know that he still hears it and it’s really none of my business whether he changes the way he’s thinking. Remember, we wanna stay out of get my child mode. Get my child mode is when we’re trying to get our child to be different than they are. The reason that this is so problematic is it focuses on what we can’t control, which is our child’s agency. So instead of get my child mode and how do I get my child to not be anxious, I focus on the mom I wanna be, what kind of mom do I want to be here? And in this example that we’ve been going with, it’s, I wanna be a mom who offers some supportive thoughts to her child. As you know, he’s transitioning into a new school and anxious about making new friends, not so that I take away his anxiety, but so that I show up as the mom that I wanna be focusing on what I can control, which is me. I can love him and support him and be there for him, but I’m not sending the message that he’s doing something wrong by feeling anxious or trying to fix how he’s feeling.

Step number four, the final step is to make sure that you are not anxious about your child’s anxiety. Helping your child from the best possible emotional place is going to be from feeling connected, from feeling strong, from feeling supportive, from feeling curious. You will not be the most effective mom if you show up feeling anxious about your child’s anxiety. This means you need to clean up the way that you are thinking and the way that you are feeling before you try to help your child. This is truly the most important step because it’s what you have the most control over. Why this comes up so much is because of mirroring neurons on default, your brain will mirror how someone else is feeling most of the time. So if you see your child feeling anxious, it’s very likely that you will then feel anxious about their anxiety. But that is just one option. You can kind of cut that off through awareness, you can notice it and you can decide intentionally how you want to feel.

And most of my clients say, you just want me to be happy about my child’s anxiety. And I say, no, that is not what I’m teaching here. The options are not either I’m anxious and worried about their anxiety or I’m happy or apathetic. That’s all or nothing thinking. If you think of a spectrum, what I teach and what I suggest is to be in the middle where you’re not anxious and worried and overwhelmed and kind of panicking about their anxiety, but you’re also not happy and thrilled or, apathetic or kind of living in the clouds in the middle is you kind of showing up almost like a coach where you believe in them, you’re feeling strong and sturdy and connected and loving and supportive, and you have confidence that you will be able to support them and be with them along the way. And you know that this is the path that they are supposed to be on, and you are not kind of looping in worrisome thoughts.

You are not kind of thinking, oh my gosh, what’s gonna happen if they don’t make friends? This would be really bad. I need to call some moms and make sure they make friends so that my child isn’t feeling this way. And, you know, thinking about what I call, the fast forward error, which is, you know, how they’re gonna grow up and never have any friends and never get a job and never have a family because of, you know, this one fall where they are feeling anxious going into school. So you want to take care of your mindset, decide what you want to think, put those kind of primitive fear-based thoughts and feelings in the backseat. It’s okay if they’re there a little bit, but you have to talk back to your brain more than you listen to it. Your brain might tell you something like, but what if they don’t make any friends? Answer your brain?

What if they don’t make friends? It would be okay. You would support them and love them and help them through it, right? Anything that is a problem today is something we can always navigate. It’s those future problems that aren’t yet problems that feel so big and unsolvable, but you can always solve the problem that’s in front of you. So just remind your brain of that and remember to do your own coaching on your own brain. The Inner Work Framework course inside the membership is something that I go through often myself and I’m always encouraging the members to go through multiple times because as your circumstances change, so the example we’ve been using in this episode is going to a new school and child feeling nervous and anxious about making new friends. That’s a new circumstance. So having tools to help you separate out what are the facts from what are my thoughts from what are my child’s thoughts is so important and it’s not something you’re born with.

In fact, growing up, just the way that our culture is, we are taught to prioritize intellect and being smart and education in that way, we are not taught to prioritize awareness. And awareness is so important. It is the difference between being able to help your child and not being able to help them. I think about, my kids now and how awareness is why they’re putting their lives at risk all of the time. So, a baby who doesn’t understand that a stove is hot needs to be protected from that stove because they don’t have the awareness yet that a stove is hot. It’s like a very simple example. Something we’ve been working on with my son Robert, is crossing the street and holding our hands and understanding that cars go and it’s not something you’re born with. You have to become aware of cars and traffic and the, the street laws and rules.

And that is through awareness. So I think that, gosh, one of my favorite parts of the membership is that it just focuses so, focuses so heavily on increasing your awareness because when you increase your awareness around what you’re thinking, you have so much more leverage around what you’re thinking. If you don’t even know that what you’re thinking is a problem, then you will try to solve the problem in a way that doesn’t get at the root cause. So if you don’t understand that thought’s, create feelings, you might try to take all of these extra action steps to solve your child’s anxiety. You might call the school ahead of time, you might call, the teachers or you might message them, or you might call the neighborhood friends and you might be taking all of these actions, sending your child the message that anxiety is bad and they shouldn’t have to experience this and this is horrible.

And, all of that would be done from such a loving, um, concerned place as a mom. And yet the feeling leading that would be your own anxiety and your own worry, not useful feelings to fuel you to help your child who’s feeling anxious. And having the awareness of that is the most important thing. So in this podcast, hopefully you are now aware that there’s nothing wrong with your child for feeling anxious and you have some steps. I’m gonna list them here again in a second to help you support your anxious child. And the more that you do this work and deepen your own awareness, the more equipped you’ll be to make your life that much better. And that means supporting your kids through their challenges, supporting yourself through your own challenges, and setting and achieving really amazing goals. That is what this work is all about, my friend. It’s what we do in the membership 10 out of 10. Recommend that you join me in there so you can see what it’s all about.

So let’s go over the four steps again to help your anxious child. Number one is to normalize your child’s feeling of anxiety. Number two is to help your child process the anxiety. Number three is to focus on your child’s thoughts and feelings, not on them taking different actions. And number four is make sure that you are not anxious about your child’s anxiety. All right my friend, thanks so much for tuning in this week. I am happy to bring you this episode. As a reminder, if you would like me to answer one of your questions, call the podcast hotline over at 8 3 3 3. Ask Nat, that’s 8 3 3 3 2 7 5 6 2 8, and I will talk with you next week. Take care.

Thank you for being here and listening. Now, head on over to mom on purpose.com/coaching to learn more about the Mom On Purpose membership, where we take all of this work to the next level.