Help your child navigate worries by normalizing big feelings and teaching calming strategies. Model resilience, explain how emotions feel in the body, and empower them to turn worry into action.
“It’s okay to feel sad sometimes, little by little, you’ll feel better again.” - Daniel Tiger
Key Concepts:
- At this age, anxiety and worries tend to involve fears around emerging understandings of big concepts (death), or between what is real and what isn’t (dinosaurs).
- Productive worries (type-A adults, you’ll recognize these!) are worries that move quickly from worry to action.
- Unproductive worries get trapped in your head and bounce around. Mostly unanswerable or unpredictable problems with no immediate action to take. Ever thought “what if…?” and then spiral? Unproductive worry!
What to Try:
- Try to assist your child in understanding the wizard and lizard brain. Educating your child in some appropriate neuroscience can go a long way!
- Talk about how normal strong feelings are. “We ALL have strong feelings when we get scared or upset! That’s how our brain works.”
- Model for your child how to talk to your brain to get your body to calm down. “You’ve got this! It’s only scary for a moment.”
- Help make anxiety physical by explaining to your child that emotions feel a certain way in your body (and we have solutions to help!). “Have you ever felt a feeling in your tummy when you were nervous?”
- Teach and practice calming strategies. Dance party (wiggle out the worries), cold water splash on the face, deep breaths, or a giant hug. Honor what your child needs without judgment.
- Talk about your own anxiety and/or worries and how you get through them. “I get worried sometimes, too. Especially before I meet someone new. I take deep breaths to remind myself that I love making new friends!”