Excerpt From: Anxiety in Children
By Francesca Coltrera, Editor of Harvard Health blog
Personalize and externalize: Ask your child to give anxiety a name. Your child can draw pictures of anxiety, too. Then, help your child acknowledge anxiety when it rears up: ‘Is that spiky-toothed, purple Bobo telling you no one wants to play with you?’ Labeling and distancing anxiety can help your child learn to be the boss of it.
Preview anxiety-provoking situations. Consider meeting camp counselors or touring new places ahead of time.
Model confidence: Children are emotional Geiger counters. They register anxiety radiating from parents. Try to be mindful of what you model through words and body language. Work on tempering overanxious reactions when appropriate.
Narrate their world: “Children are coding the world. Particularly through early childhood their brains are just sponges, taking everything in,” says Dr. Potter. “We can help them with the narrative they’re constructing: ‘Is the world a safe place or a dangerous place where I have to be on guard all the time?’”
Allow distress: Avoiding distressing situations invites anxiety to ease temporarily, only to pop up elsewhere. Rational explanations won’t work, either. The whirring emotional center of the brain known as the limbic system requires time and tools to calm down enough to let the thinking (cognitive) center of the brain come back online. Instead, try distress tolerance tools: one child might splash her face with cold water, another might charge up and down stairs to blow off anxious energy, or tense and relax her muscles, or distract herself by looking around to find every color in the rainbow.
Practice exposure: Gradual exposure helps rewire an anxious brain and shows a child he can survive anxious moments. Let’s say your child is anxious about talking in public, ducking his head and squirming if addressed. Pick a pleasant, slow-paced restaurant for a fun weekly date. Then coach your child to take charge of ordering foods he likes in small steps. At first, he might whisper the order to you and you’ll relay it to the waitress. Next, he might order just his drink or dessert, and finally a full meal as distress tolerance and confidence grows.
By Leah Shafer, Harvard Graduate School of Education
With so many different stressors, a key piece of advice for parents is to individualize your approach. In the same way that different teenagers need different types of social support from their parents, they need different types of digital support, as well. Weinstein suggests that if your teen seems irritable or overwhelmed by social media, pay attention to what specifically is causing those feelings.
Giller agrees. "Really check in with your teen about what's going on," she says. Parents can and should help support and problem-solve with their teen, but they should also offer validation about how difficult these situations can be. Relatedly, don’t just take your teen’s phone away if you suspect drama. Doing so won’t get to the heart of the social issue at play — and it could potentially make your teen more upset by separating her from her friends and other aspects of digital media she enjoys.
However, as a family, you can also set screen-free times — whether it’s every evening after 9 p.m., on the car ride to school, an occasional screen-free weekend, or longer stretches over vacations and camps. “Many teens say they appreciate” these chances, says education writer Anya Kamenetz, whose upcoming book The Art of Screen Time: How Your Family Can Balance Digital Media and Real Life explores these issues in-depth.
A significant part of your teen’s phone habits may be related to her parents, too. “Be good role models in your own use of tech,” advises Kamenetz. That means being mindful of your own distracted habit of reaching for your cell, but it also means rejecting the isolation that screen time can generate. Make digital media an opportunity for real-life social opportunities, she says. Share some media activities with your teenager — playing games, watching YouTube clips, or reading up on mutual interests together.
And in most situations, it’s best to work with your teen to set social media expectations. “You want to build consensus and get their buy-in,” says Kamenetz. Constant surveillance or control won’t build trust. Make it an open, mutual discussion.
You want to get teens to put their devices down on their own, says Weinstein, “so that you’re helping them build their ability to manage their interactions with and through technology.” And that’s increasingly looking like a key life skill that we’ll all need to develop, now and into the future.
The Clay Center for Young Healthy Minds
The Clay Center is a free, practical, online resource dedicated to promoting and supporting the mental, emotional, and behavioral well-being of children, teens, and young adults.
Link: https://www.mghclaycenter.org/