June 15, 2022

When I heard this question — and I hear versions of it a lot — is what exactly do you mean by that specifically? Are you asking in the moment when you’re getting impatient with your anxious child who’s right there in front of you? Or are we talking big picture? How can I be more patient as we work through our anxiety?

Let’s answer both versions of the question and let’s start with the first one and that’s, you’ve got an anxious child in front of you and you’re feeling impatient. Maybe it’s because you’re trying to get out the door and your child is whining because they’re afraid of whatever’s coming next whether you’re trying to get them to school or to an activity, maybe you’re trying to get them to go to sleep and they don’t want you to leave the room and you’re getting impatient because you really need a break from parenting.

The thing about getting impatient is that there are two things at play here.

One is that we need to remember that when your child is anxious, you’re going to catch their anxiety. You’re going to catch it in part because you’re human and we are meant to catch each other’s anxiety as a way to stay safe.

Anxiety alerts us to danger and so if you’re feeling anxious when your child is anxious, that’s because their body and their energy is alerting you to danger even though there’s no danger there.

And you may feel that as being angry, being irritable, being impatient. So there’s that. You might be catching it from them and that’s normal. That’s part of anxiety.

To that end. I would say that, remember, one of the things we’re trying to teach our children is how to tolerate uncomfortable feelings so we need to tolerate our uncomfortable feelings.

When we’re feeling impatient that’s a really great opportunity to stop and say, oh yeah, this is, this is that uncomfortable feeling I need to learn to tolerate.

Because it’s hard, that’s why we need to practice it.

There are tools that you can do to help bring some more calm (and I’ll mention those at the end of the post because I have an offer for you), but there are tools to create more calm and just as anxiety is catching, so is calm.

As you calm yourself, you’re going to be changing the energy of the interaction between you and your child, which isn’t necessarily going to change how they behave but hopefully we’ll change things for you a little bit.

So there’s that part of impatient when you’re in the moment and you’re feeling impatient.

The other one is more big picture, which is impatience is a really useful parenting tool actually. I know we beat ourselves up a lot for not having the best, most perfect, most greatest calm and patient feelings with our kids.

It’s what we do as parents. But I am a huge believer in your inner wisdom and when you’re feeling big picture impatient with your child, which means, “I’m getting impatient that they never unload the dishwasher. I’m getting impatient because they’re not figuring out how to use the potty. I’m getting impatient because I feel like they’re ready for a developmental milestone!” Part of that is a sign that, yeah, something needs to change.

Your instinct, your impatience tells us that something needs to change. Maybe your child really is ready to grow, and there’s something that’s getting them stuck that needs to be examined, or maybe your expectations are unrealistic and you need to figure out what is realistic to expect of a child at that age.

If you’re not sure whether or not your expectations are developmentally appropriate, it’s pretty easy to find out. You can ask friends who have kids the same age. You can check in with the teacher, the school counselor, a general kid counselor. You can ask the pediatrician and you can look at books. I’ll add that in the child anxiety support membership, we do have a nitty gritty child development course that’s just really quick, easy, almost like information cards that you can just look and say, what’s going on with my kid at this age that could be driving some of this behavior. As kids get older, their, their development gets more and more individualized, which means it’s not like when you know an 18 month old should be doing X, Y, and Z. A nine-year-old is a much more complicated person developmentally than an 18 month old, but there’s still some general things that you can expect of your 9-year old

if you are feeling impatient, that’s one of the first places to look. Instead of saying, what’s wrong with me? Why am I so impatient? What’s wrong with my kid? Why aren’t they behaving first stop and find out, is this a developmentally appropriate expectation? And if it is, then it’s a sign, this impatience that you’re having with your child, that they need your help, they need your help. They’re stuck.

And this is definitely true with anxiety. That’s what we know most about anxiety is that anxiety gets families and gets kids stuck. So naturally you’re going to feel impatient. It’s, it’s sort of how we do an assessment if things are going okay. So don’t beat yourself up about it instead. Say, okay, my impatience is telling me things need to change.

Back to that offer, this is what I want to share with you. I have a quiz at my website. It’s a Parenting Pitfalls quiz. And it’s about that impatience. It’s about that stuckness. The quiz is based on the research that tells us 94 to 99% of families are doing things that get everybody more stuck.

94 to 99% that blows my mind! And that 1 to 6%, frankly, I think we just caught them on a good day. Because if you have an anxious child, chances are you’re going to get stuck periodically. When there’s needs to be new growth, if you’ve got an anxious child, they’re going to get anxious about it.

And they’re going to do things to slow down that growth because it scares them and anxieties about. Unfortunately, as parents we’re trying to help our kids. And instead what we do tends to get them more stuck. We get more impatient, we feel more guilty about it. We feel more stuck because we’re sort of overcompensating since we’re feeling guilty. And that’s how you get patterns of anxiety that impact an entire family. So this is what the quiz is about. When you take it and you don’t have to give me your email to take it, you don’t have to give me your email to get your results. It’s going to give you 10 questions.

And those questions are the common pitfalls that families get stuck in. In other words, if you answer yes to any of them, you are so not alone. So you take the quiz and then it gives you your results and it will tell you exactly how stuck you are.

You will also get an offer for a free gift from me, which is the seven day, Get Yourself Grounded email course. Absolutely one hundred percent free. The point of the course is to give you tools that you can use in those moments when you’re getting impatient with your kid right there in the moment where you’re trying to get them out the door, where they’re whining about the exam tomorrow.

Where you’re both kind of fed up with each other. It gives you tools to unhook from your child’s anxiety and to bring calm to the interaction. Once you’ve taken the course you’ll know me a little better, and that will help you figure out whether or not you feel like your family is a good fit for the child, anxiety, support membership.

If you are feeling stuck, then I’d say you’re a good fit. The child anxiety support membership is asynchronous courses, which means you take them on your own time and community support. And also I’m there too. If you need help, you can reach out to me. There’s message boards, there’s private messaging, and I can help direct you.

I can give you very specific information related to your specific challenges or direct you to other resources on the site to give you a hand. There is no ahead or behind in Child Anxiety Support. There is a central course, Strong Kids Strong Families, and that is very structured, but you don’t have to do it all at once.

You can dip in, you can dip out, you can take a minute. There’s other things you can work on too. The thing is about child anxiety is it’s going to require big structural systemic change in your family. Now that sounds overwhelming, but it’s really not because we tease it out bit by bit to help you figure out what you need to do in the moment.

It builds your skills and teaches you how to build your child’s skills so that you know what to do later on down the line. If you’re dealing with a five-year-old, who’s struggling to sleep alone. And then later on, you’re dealing with a 12 year old, who’s worried about middle school. Those tools will work, whatever the situation is.

So. Bringing tools that will last a lifetime of parenting. You can start just by taking that quiz. Let me know what your answers are. I would really love to hear about it, and I’d really love to hear if taking the quiz brings anything up for you.

Is there anything that you didn’t realize was a pitfall? Did you think it was a help and now you’re discovering it’s a hindrance. How do you feel about that. What do you think? I look forward to hearing from you and I’ll see you all next week.