“Don’t believe every worried thought you have. Worried thoughts are notoriously inaccurate.” - Renee Jain
Key Concepts:
- At this age, anxiety and worries tend to revolve around new independence, social situations, friendships, and navigating new experiences.
- 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 back and forth. Mostly unanswerable or unpredictable problems with no immediate action to take. Ever thought “what if…?” and then spiral? Unproductive worry!
What to Try:
- Accept all feelings your child is having (even if they seem silly to you), and emphasize how normal these strong feelings are.
- When your child expresses a feeling, don’t rush into repair-mode. Instead, give your child
- empathy and validation. Try,“that sounds like it was really upsetting.”
- Teach your child strategies to help calm down the worries. A splash of cold water? Journaling? Help them find their thing(s) and honor what they need in the moment.
- Talk about what has worked in the past. Remind your child of how they’ve gotten through these big feelings before and what strategies helped them. This helps strengthen resilience.
- Welcome worried feelings as a visitor who will continue to pop by. Acknowledge that these feelings might come back during certain times (first days of practice, before a test, etc.) and that your child does not need to fear them or feel like a failure.
- Have confidence in your child's ability to manage hard feelings.
- Try to connect the physical with the emotional by talking about how emotions impact us physically (stomach ache, lack of sleep). Provide strategies for “shaking the worries out” (like jumping jacks).
- Use a rating scale to help your child talk about their worries and anxieties. Ask them to give their worry or anxiety a number from 1 (calm) to 10 (tornado). This lets you comment on their progress, too. “This morning you were an 8, but now you're a 2.”
- Designate 5 minutes of worry time to share ALL their worries. Let your child know that you will hold their worries and they can let them go.
- Talk about your own experience with anxiety and worry and what strategies help you.