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Dawn Friedman MSEd

What if I don’t mind being stuck in the parenting pitfalls?

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I really like this question because it’s complicated. The person who asked this did not ask it quite so simply. What she asked was this: “I have been listening to your podcast and took your parenting pitfalls quiz, and I scored high. I know that my child has anxiety but I don’t have an issue with helping him. You say on your podcast that you should follow your instincts. I was an anxious little girl and my mother never helped me and I don’t want to do that to my son. If I don’t have a problem with helping and it seems to help Why is this an issue?”

This is a very good question because I do think we need to follow our instincts, but I also think it’s important to stop and interrogate those instincts. What I mean is to make sure that we’re not projecting onto our kids. That is so tough. That’s what I mean about this being deep work. 

.One of the things I learned early on in my career working with kids is that it is important to have a developmental context in parenting decisions. We need to understand what is typical so that our expectations will be realistic. And when I say expectations, I mean like understanding that a two-year-old can’t be left alone in a bath, but also understanding that an eight-year-old needs to be able to separate from their parents. An 8-year old who is struggling to separate from a parent is not bad, they are not behind, they don’t have bad parents — but they do need help. Because it is a reasonable expectation developmentally for a neurotypical child to be able to separate from their parents. And it’s also a reasonable expectation for many neurodiverse kids, too. It can be more complicated for those neurodiverse children — we need to step back and see what else might be going on — but if we start with the belief that our children can separate but may need help, that opens us up to figuring out the help.

This is different from saying, “They SHOULD do it and we need to MAKE them.” Ok, I want to be clear about that. We’re saying, “This is appropriate for them developmentally and we need to figure out how to help them grow into it.”

That also means that we’re thinking of it as a process with steps and a trajectory and many little goals along the way.

When there is reluctance either on a parents’ part or a child’s part, I think it helps to slow it down. Let’s figure out what’s getting in the way and figure out how to address those obstacles, whatever they are.

Going back to the question where the parent isn’t wanting to step out of the parenting pitfalls, I’m seeing the parents’ obstacles but that doesn’t mean there aren’t some for their child, too. Remember parenting is a relationship and it’s shaped by the participants in the relationship. Which means that even if the mom is saying it’s me, it’s all me, I like helping, I want to help, I’m not going to assume it is in fact all hers.

Let me tell you more about reluctant parents in the anxious relationship.

I see lots of reluctant parents. And I think sometimes my job is less about trying to shove people through a program and more about being a step along the way as people figure it out. The fact that this person is listening to my podcast tells me that she is thinking about this. She is thinking about child anxiety and how to help her child. Per her own words, she’s not ready to change yet but she might be getting there. 

Reluctance can happen for lots of reasons, often more than one. But some of the most common I see are:

First: Parents who were themselves anxious as kids and who didn’t feel well supported as kids and so are hypersensitive to their own children’s distress. 

Now I’ve said before that my population of parents tend to be gentle parents, respectful parents, conscious parents — you know, people who are trying to really be there for their kids. And many of us come to this style of parenting because we want to do things differently than our own parents did. We forget that our children are already growing up in a more supportive context and so their distress does not look like our distress. The mom who wrote me for the podcast says her mom didn’t help her. But she does help her son, which means she can lovingly pull back on the help especially if she explains to her son what’s happening. That’s part of the program. You are informing your kids. That doesn’t look the same as a parent just NOT helping. Ok.

The second most common reason is an intense kid. This is a child whose anxiety is big, whose behavior may be even bigger. A child who gets very upset sometimes very disruptive and the parents are trying to figure out how to manage that behavior and often they do this by accommodating the anxiety. That takes care but is not insurmountable, not at all. Having a structured, clear plan and extra support makes a huge difference. But man, I get it. I get why parents are reluctant when they know that pulling back on the pitfalls is going to mean meltdowns. 

And the third most common reason parents are reluctant is a bit of both. They’re sensitive and intense, their child is sensitive and intense. The anxiety is strong for both the parent and the child. And that is THE most common reason people reach out to me. That’s the parent most likely to contact me about the program is having a bit of both. And yes, it’s difficult and it might take time before that parent is really motivated to change and boy do I get it. 

If they are not ready to do the whole program, they can still benefit by joining it and starting the exploration. I actually have a course in child Anxiety Support that’s all about change and it honors this. It honors that we need to come to change on our own time and in our own way. Understanding that can help us as we move forward. We can learn about anxiety, we can spend our time in the CBT Family part of the course, just kind of browsing the activities there and seeing if any of them interest us or might interest our child. We can read through Strong Kids Strong Families and directly confront that resistance. Talk it out with me, argue with me, play around with how approaching it could look. There’s lots of time to stop and observe what’s happening with new understanding. 

The thing about parenting an anxious child is that it takes a paradigm shift to start addressing the anxiety. Sometimes you can’t do things differently until you have that shift and sometimes you need to have that shift before you can do things differently. It’s not better to do it one way or the other, you just start wherever you can. 

Basically what I’m saying is that growth is not and should not necessarily be a straight line. And here I want to speak directly to that mom who wrote me. And I want to say to her, I’m so glad that you’re listening and that you reached out. I know you care deeply about your son and you’re working hard to provide for him in a way that you were not provided for. That’s impressive. If you ever want some support as you figure out next steps, let me know. 

What if I don’t mind being stuck in the parenting pitfalls? Read More »

What does successful child anxiety treatment look like?

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The question, “What does successful child anxiety treatment look like?” is one that that I made up based on different versions I’ve heard from people who are coming to me to ask about my program or to ask why treatment they’ve sought before didn’t work. 

First I want to talk a bit about expectations because I think this gets in the way of successful treatment.

Many parents who talk to me tell me that their child went through counseling and they’re still anxious and so they say counseling didn’t work. 

But anxiety isn’t something you just cure like a rash. Treatment isn’t like a course of antibiotics. It’s never going to clear up like that. That’s because anxious brains are shaped to be anxious and anxiety isn’t necessarily going to go away. For one, it’s part of us and it’s an important part of us. 

Anxiety does a lot of good things. It makes us look both ways before we cross the street. It makes us make sure our nice work outfit is clean the night before a big interview. We need anxiety; some of us are just more sensitive to it than others and That’s fine as long as we’re still running the show.

The problems start when our anxiety gets out of control. That can look like seeing danger everywhere even where there is no danger. That can look like having such strong somatic symptoms such as stomachaches or headaches that we feel incapacitated. Sometimes that can be feeling frozen because our standards for performance are too high. Sometimes unmanaged anxiety can result in depression as we become increasingly discouraged or get down on ourselves for not being able to move forward. 

So what does managed anxiety look like. It looks like seeing danger and being able to say to ourselves, “Oh that feels dangerous but it’s not dangerous.” That can look like having somatic symptoms and recognizing them as anxiety and knowing how to calm those symptoms down. That can look like recognizing our perfectionism as anxiety and knowing how to realistically lower our standards. And it can also look like being kind to ourselves when we’re feeling sad or incapable or discouraged so that we can muddle through anyway.

Successful treatment is going to give us three things:

  • It’s going to give us an understanding of our anxious experience, understanding how it feels in our body — where it shows up — and how it tries to trick us. So we’ll understand how it can warp our point of view and how we see things.
  • It’s going to give us coping tools that work for us, so we’ll need to try different things at different times to help us with the inevitable dread of anxiety, of the fear of stress response, and for coming down after we’ve faced it when we might feel more fragile.
  • And it’s going to give us a sense of ourselves as successful, as people who can face our anxiety and get through it rather than avoid it.

What that treatment is not necessarily going to do is not make us anxious. I mean, it can. Especially for specific phobias or fears. You can overcome a fear of dogs or bridges or public speaking. Absolutely yes, you can do this. But if we have specific phobias or fears, we may just be a bit more prone to other worries, too, and again, that’s part of our make up.

Child anxiety is trickier to treat than adult anxiety for a couple of reasons. The first is that there is the developmental component. We need to shape our education and intervention to the child’s age and, importantly, we will need to revisit the learning as they grow older. Kids need to learn things over and over and over again because they are changing and their understanding of the world changes, too. Knowing how to manage sad feelings when you’re three or five is very different than knowing how to manage the sad feeling that come with a first break up or a major disappointment like not getting into our number one school. Right? So emotional regulation, identifying emotions — that’s ongoing for all of us. We learn over and over again. 

And the second reason that anxiety is harder to treat in kids is attached to that, which is that someone needs to teach that to the child again and again. And the ideal people to do that, is their parents. The way that we teach our children how to manage their anxiety is both direct — in talking to them, sharing the information and observation, learning about the technicalities of anxiety and anxious cognitions so that we can pass that on. But also indirect by setting an example for them by using those tools, recognizing our own cognitive distortions and facing our own anxiety particularly our worries about their worry.

And of course we teach them not to avoid by not helping them avoid, which is the crux of the Child Anxiety Support program.

Successful treatment doesn’t mean our kids won’t struggle or that we won’t struggle with them. Successful treatment is going to mean that you both know more or less how to do it. 

My goals for people who go through my program is that they are realistic with themselves and their kids about what anti anxiety work looks like. That they learn what’s unique about their child so they understand that child’s particular challenges and can shape their support to fit that child. And that they understand what the goals are. They know how to walk themselves through the problem solving of child anxiety and are able to pass those skills — identifying the avoidance, making the plan, celebrating progress — to their child so that when that child is grown up and wanting to avoid, that child is able to take themselves in hand and push through and cope.

That’s successful anxiety treatment.

There are still going to be sleepless nights and new challenges. There will be setbacks and frustrations. That’s ok. Life is like that. It’s a journey, right? 

I mean, think of it this way. Think of something you know how to do that’s not easy. Maybe it’s satisfying, maybe you enjoy it, but it’s not easy. Whether that’s running or knitting or gardening. Even if you’re great at those things, sometimes it’s hard. It’s just built into the doing of the thing that sometimes it’s hard. Anxiety life is like that, too. Sometimes it’s just hard but that doesn’t mean you’ve failed. You have to rely on those tools you’ve learned.

So I guess I’d say the only time counseling or a program like mine doesn’t work is if it failed to teach you and to teach your child how to cope. And I’d say that if that’s the case, it’s time tot ry another therapist or another program. Because there are lots of resources out there and it’s important that you find the one that makes sense to you. That makes this information and those tools accessible to you. 

What does successful child anxiety treatment look like? Read More »

Are there any downsides to practicing gentle parenting with an anxious child?

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This question is a simplified version of one I get in various forms. Usually the person reaching out identifies as a gentle parent and they’re struggling because someone else in their life and in their child’s life — whether that’s a co-parent, a grandparent, or another caregiver — is critical of gentle parenting.

Gentle parenting has become a popular term to describe parenting practices that back in my day fell under the attachment parenting label. You may also hear this described as respectful parenting or conscious parenting. And sure there might be subtle differences in the way people apply theses labels, but generally we’re talking about parents who are working hard to be tuned in to and connected to their children. How this looks might be a focus on discussion, respect for a child’s feelings and point of view, and more collaboration, less punishment.

Outsiders tend to dismiss gentle parenting as helicopter parenting, or over parenting. They may call it “spoiling”. Gentle parents are often blamed for their kids’ behavior or struggles. People may say, you’re too easy on them. They’re manipulating you. Gentle parenting might get confused with permissive parenting where there are no rules or guidance.There are definitely rules and guidance in gentle parenting although this may not look the same as in more traditional parenting.

For the gentle parent who has a more challenging kid, it’s even more complicated. Those challenges may be what brought them to gentle parenting. Parent may have realized that this is a child who needs a different approach.

Or the gentle parent may have come to this style of parenting because of their own childhood — either wanting to parent in similar ways to their own gentle parents or because they are critical of the way they were raised and want to do things differently.

I’ll share that most of the people who reach out to me are the latter, people who are trying to parenting differently, and who sometimes find themselves up against their own strong feelings about a situation they went through as a kid and trying to figure out what is right for their own child. So they do worry about over parenting but they worry a lot more about under parenting.

I hope this has set the general stage for our discussion about how this impacts child anxiety.

Now I identified as an attachment parent in my own parenting career and I spent a lot of time on email groups devoted to this kind of parenting. That’s what we had instead of FB groups. We had listervs and in many of these groups there was a kind of litmus test for whether or not you qualified as a true attachment parent, which I will tell you now is ridiculous. Any list that says you’re out and you’re in is ridiculous. In any case, that kind of binary, that kind of either you’re right or you’re wrong thinking, can create a lot of anxiety in parents. But especially in parents who are trying to learn a new way of parenting. 

Gentle parenting younger kids is fairly straight forward — no crying it out, no physical discipline, lots of discussion — but it can definitely be tricky to figure out how to gently parent bigger kids. The reason why there are fewer parenting books as kids get older is that their development becomes much more individualized. Toddlers tend to all be more or less in the same ballpark. Teenagers, on the other hand, are all on totally different playing fields. 

But even those kids all in the same developmental zone are unique people and you are a unique person. Anyone who tells you there’s one right way to raise all kids doesn’t know what they’re talking about. While there are some clear research like physical discipline has a lot of negative outcomes for kids and for the relationship, there is lots of nuance about other things like time out or sleep choices or schooling. 

So I have to tell you my parenting philosophy as an educator and as a counselor, which is that you and your child are meant to build and teach and grow each other. You’re the parent so you’re going to be making the bulk of the decisions, obviously, like where to live and how to spend the money and how to make the money and all those big picture things. But those big picture things are influenced by the child you get. 

I remember I had very strong ideas about how to parent for independence that were shaped by my time as a preschool teacher, which I did before I had kids. Then I had my son and a lot of my great ideas didn’t fit him. While I was definitely the decider, my son shaped me to be the parent he needed. Tuning into his needs with a background on general child development, helped me with my decision making. Not that it was always easy. And then his sister came along and she was a totally different person with different needs, and she shaped me again. The tools and techniques that I nailed with my son didn’t always work for her. 

I’m telling you this to remind you that ultimately you are the expert on your child. No parenting educator — me or anyone else — knows more about your child than you do. What I know about, and what other educators know about, is children in general. I have expertise in general child development and on child anxiety and general parenting and what I have to say may be useful to you but it’s only useful when it’s filtered through your expertise and experience.

Back to gentle parenting. Many self-identified gentle parents are worried about getting it right. Between the groups and the books and the podcasts like this and the instagram and the TikTok, it can feel like there are a lot of rules you have to keep track of. I’m telling you right now, that any anxiety you have about getting it right is likely getting in your way.

Your relationship with your child is the most essential piece. That doesn’t mean you always have to like each other — sometimes kids don’t like parents, and sometimes parents aren’t liking their kids. That’s ok. If there is central love and respect, you can lean on that as you do the hard work of growing together. In fact, my belief based on years of experience, is that when you aren’t liking each other or when you’re not liking parenting, this is a wonderful indicator for you that things need to change. Instead of fighting that feeling, I think parents and kids are best served when they acknowledge it and recognize it as a tool. Gentle parents tend to feel guilty instead of remember that they did the hard work of gentle parenting so that they can trust the relationship, trust the messages within the relationship — including the ones that say, Hey this isn’t working for us anymore — and change things up. 

\There is a natural ebb and flow — a weaning dance that begins the minute you first hold your child and goes on even after they move out. Sometimes the ebb is evident through the conflict or unhappiness in the relationship and we need to adjust things to get back into flow. So if you’re struggling, I’d like you to reframe this as, “I’m a good parent with a good kid so this frustration or conflict or stuck feeling is a sign that we’re ready for something new.”

For gentle parents, anxiety treatment can be tough because it means your child is going to be upset and you’re going to be the one either upsetting them or not preventing their upset. Gentle parents tend to be much more vulnerable to the Parenting Pitfalls and they tend to need more support as they learn to get unstuck. 

This is not caused by gentle parenting; it’s caused by parents who are still growing in confidence as parents.

We all have insecure times, times when we think, “This poor kid, I have no idea what I’m doing” but the gentle parent tends to be much harder on themselves. 

Now the one thing that I HAVE noticed about gentle parents is that we tend to talk too much. We tend to reassure too often — that’s a big parenting pitfall for gentle parents. And we often avoid dealing with anxiety, hoping we can wait until we get buy in from our children and that’s not realistic. Anxious kids don’t usually say, “Hey I need you to push me out of my comfort zone” so we’re going to have to push even when they’ve dug in their heels. There’s a clear way to do this but there’s no getting around that it’s not going to feel great. 

And we tend to over explain. I tell gentle parents that most of us parenting via discussion and that’s great but we sometimes need to skip the conversation and focus on action.

When I taught preschool there was one lovely little boy named Daniel. As an aside, Daniel is in his late 30s now, which obviously makes me feel really old. Anyway. Back to Daniel. Daniel often got into 3-year old kinds of trouble, you know, upending routines or whatever. And I’d take him aside and we would have a quiet private time to discuss and process this. We realized I was creating a problem when he did something — spilled his juice on purpose or knocked over someone’s block tower — and the other teacher stepped in and he looked up with his bright and shiny smile and said, “Do I get to talk to Dawn now?” And we realized we were doing a great job of teaching him that the way to get some special time with me was to do something not great for the classroom.

That’s what lots of gentle parents are doing. They are taking their child’s worries so seriously, processing them so much, that they mistakenly elevate those worries. WE often want to “get to the bottom of things.” We want to know the why of things. Why are you scared of butterflies? What’s scaring you at bedtime? Lots of times our kids don’t know and frankly they don’t have to know and neither do we. We can just trust them that they find butterflies and bedtime scary and we can create a plan to help them with this without digging in and shining a big light on it. Sometimes they so don’t know that trying to have a big talk about it will actually CREATE the reason. 

Our child runs screaming from butterflies and yes, we explain to them why butterflies are safe. Maybe we do a whole thing about butterflies, ordering monarch catapilars to grow in our houses, heading to the library for butterfly books, and that’s great. A non anxious child will take this and run with it. An anxious child might but they might also get stuck. Again, experiments and books and things are great — those are exposures. Exposures are good for anxiety. But anxious kids can be blackholes where they need more and more and more. An explanation every time. Processing every butterfly sighting. This is different than a child who is genuinely interested. The child with genuine interest will go towards the butterfly opportunities. The anxious child will continue to insist on your help.

Remember that the reason why the parenting pitfalls are so sticky is that they can work for non anxious kids and so we keep using them for our anxious kids not realizing that we’re all stuck. More discussion, more preparation, more hand holding at parks where there are butterflies. That’s when it becomes a pitfall.

What we need to do is explain once, process once, then remain supportive but from a comfortable distance where we have curiosity but are reminding them and pushing them to rely of their own strengths and resources, and not avoiding.

What does this look like? 

You do the things with your anxious child — explain, share resources, look at books, etc. The next time at the field when our child runs screaming to us about butterflies. We help calm them — hugs perhaps, but we keep our focus off of them. We display a confidence that all is well. That might mean continuing a conversation with our friend who’s with us, or just remaining friendly neutral. It’s not ignoring them; it’s shifting our attention to something other than the butterflies. We might put the processing back on them.

“Remember that book we got out at the library? What do you think that butterfly is doing?” 

We can validate without getting stuck.

“Yup, I remember that fluttery butterflies can make you feel nervous. I also know you can handle this.”

The goal here is not perfection; it’s helping them grow into being able to handle it. It’s the anxiety version of letting go of the bike when they’re learning to ride but sticking close by.

It’s not continuing to hold on. It’s not panicking as they ride (even if we feel a little panicky inside). It’s rolling with it. It’s knowing that if they fall, the’ll be ok even if they’re less sure about that.

To finish up, the thing I want you to know is that by choosing gentle parenting you have created a bank of good parenting. You have made a sound deposit in your child’s well being and in the relationship. You have been trustworthy, respectful, validating. Yo can trust that. You can trust that foundation. You can lean on it. You can create flexibility and movement in the relationship by asking more of them. They will grow through this, even if it feels hard sometimes. And you will grow, too. Both of you will grow in distress tolerance, in being able to stretch to meet the next challenge.



Are there any downsides to practicing gentle parenting with an anxious child? Read More »

How does Pathological Demand Avoidance or PDA fit with regular anxiety?

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This week’s question is a pretty long one that I shortened for our title. The question in full is:

How does PDA, which some people prefer to call Demand Anxiety, fit with regular anxiety, and should it be treated any differently? The advice seems to be to reduce demands (for example, with my home-educated son who gets extremely upset whenever he’s put under any formal pressure to write or do maths, the advice is to do more child-led learning, games etc.), but is this a form of avoidance which will therefore make the problem worse? Or is waiting till the child is a bit older for these things harmless?

podcast listener

I have been getting different versions of this question for some time and so I wanted to sit down and dig into the research and see what we really know about pathological demand avoidance or PDA. What I discovered is that we’re still figuring it out. There isn’t a clear definition for what constitutes PDA, there is still ongoing research to try to figure out which kids meet criteria and which do not, and because we are still looking at the criteria that means we’re still arguing about how to manage it.

When I say we hear, as in we’re trying to figure it out, I’m talking about people in the mental health and behavioral fields. That’s therapists, psychologists, educators, etc. 

This makes it really difficult for parents to find good information that’s appropriate for their particular child and their particular family. But difficult does not mean impossible.

It’s always true that as parents we have to figure out where to get our information. Who are we going to trust to help us figure out how to best parent our kids — anxious or not. There are as many good ways to raise kids as there are kids. Every child needs a different kind of parent.

For kids who have challenges — whether that’s  an anxiety diagnosis, a neurodifference, any kind of special needs — we need to be particularly discerning since you have the controversies and opinions of typical parenting and then you have the added complications of our child’s particular needs. This feels especially true when we’re talking about children who might fit a PDA profile.

And let’s talk about that PDA profile for a minute — there’s still a lot of discussion about who fits that profile. For those of you who aren’t aware, PDA is generally used to describe children who become anxious when faced with demands to the point that their everyday functioning is disrupted.

What is a demand? Well, just about anything can be a demand. Requests, commands, expectations from someone else or from the child themselves like needing to eat or go to the bathroom, and the general requirements of existing. So for some kids facing a cold day can be a demand if they are sensitive to cold. Putting on a sweater may be a demand because your parent asked you to. Going outside to play in the snow may be a demand because the child is looking forward to it and is afraid of being disappointed.

Every child — every person — will have some demand avoidance now and then and there does seem to be correlation with anxiety because the demand itself — the feeling of needing to perform or show up or respond in some way — can create anxiety.

Currently the belief is that PDA is under the autism spectrum umbrella but again, this is still being discussed and the woman who coined the term, developmental psychologist Elizabeth Newsome specifically argued that it did NOT belong under this umbrella. See? Controversial.

And while demand avoidance is discussed in the context of anxiety, there are those with lived experience — adults who identify as PDAers — who do not see anxiety as part of what’s happening for them. Which makes me think we need to be open to a more nuanced discussion about what PDA might be for individuals.

That said, I think there is value in thinking about demand avoidance as part of an anxiety profile. And I do not think we need to — at this moment — get hung up on PDA diagnoses since that’s still in flux. Remember that ultimately a diagnosis is a cultural construct as well and at this moment, at the time of this recording, a PDA diagnosis doesn’t really exist here in the states. Therefore children who might fit this PDA profile will not get supports like an IEP or a 504 because they fit that PDA profile. However, adults who care about, are taking care of or who are educating kids who have some PDA in their make up can benefit from considering this as they talk about how best to support and serve these children and their families.

Further, it’s not just PDA kids who might balk at demands. There are other kids with neurodifferences who are demand avoidant and there are neurotypical kids who are demand avoidant. Heck, we as parents may have — and likely do have — our own demand avoidance. The more we learn about it, the more we might bring new understanding to how we all function. 

In other words, let’s focus on understanding demand avoidance if that seems present in our children and — because this is The Child Anxiety FAQ — what does this mean for anxiety treatment.

My take and observation in working with families whose children fit this profile is that there may need to be some time for everyone to consider how seeing things through the lens of demands might shift our perspective. How might that helps us see where our child sturggles and where we struggle. 

Demands are often invisible so if we’re looking for them, might we better understand why our child might sometimes meltdown about quote nothing. Looking for demands might help us realize that mornings are more difficult than we realized. When we see that waking up is a demand, getting dressed is a demand, eating a breakfast our parents made fro us is a demand, we can recognize that our child is running an exhausting gauntlet every morning and isn’t just trying to be difficult. We may be more forgiving of ourselves recognizing that dragging a child through a series of demands is tough on any parent and no wonder then we are having such a hard time.

So what to do about it? That’s going to be very individualistic. A child who is demand avoidant may not fit the usual advice about parenting. In fact, I’m going to say they definitely to do not.

A lot of the advice I see among lay people around PDA is to dig into demand avoidance and help their child avoid demands. In talking to my clinical colleagues, I’m not 100% behind this approach. I think there still needs to be exposures to demands but I think those exposures need to be more judicious and go more slowly. I strongly feel that parents need space, too, and do not just need to be told to shape their life around their child’s demand avoidance. The family system is still a system and we need to be realistic and aware that parents have needs, too, that other siblings have needs, too, and that they need to be part of the equation.

Referring to the original which asked if demand avoidance — like homeschooling with child led learning would make things worse? The answer is complicated. There is nothing wrong with doing more child-led learning and in fact, I’d say that’s a great plan if you can do it because it will relieve some bandwidth to tackle other demands that you can’t avoid. And that’s really what we’re talking about here. Instead of twisting ourselves in knots to avoid all demands, we can and should start recognizing demands so we can prioritize them. We’re basically going to need to triage. 

I guess as I think about it, I’m uncomfortable with the word worse. Demand avoidant kids grow up to be demand avoidant people — at least as far as we can tell from the anecdotal research — but that doesn’t mean that they can’t learn to face and overcome necessarily demands or those demands they need to face to do the things they want to do. That’s what I mean about priorities. If we can avoid unnecessary demands or get creative in how we face them, then we can focus on skill building in the inevitable demands. Because we are going to have to face demands. We’re just going to have to. Demands are built into our lives. Like I said, cold weather can be a demand. So how we be creative? Maybe there are ways to keep warm or deal with cold that are less traditional. Maybe kids will want to wear footie pajamas instead of a coat and maybe that can work. 

Recognizing and facing demand avoidance is an opportunity to wrestle with what’s really important for us as individuals and as families? What is a cultural construct we can reject? Parents  of demand avoidance are going to need to be more flexible, more open to alternative solutions, and be more honest with themselves about their boundaries.

I created a training called Anxiety Through the Lens of Demands that digs into this topic further, looks at the controversies a bit more closely, and discusses what we do know and how we can apply it to anxiety. I encourage you to check it out and let me know if you have any questions!



How does Pathological Demand Avoidance or PDA fit with regular anxiety? Read More »

Should I tell my child that they have an Anxiety Disorder?

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The listener who came to me with this question specifically asked, “Should I tell my teen that he has an Anxiety Disorder? Will it help him?”

First let me share the arguments I’ve heard against sharing an anxiety disorder diagnosis with a child or teen, namely that doing so can influence how a person sees themselves and their functioning. Especially for teens who are working on issues of identity — figuring out who they are and what that means — being told they have a specific diagnosis may become a very important aspects of who they are in ways that can be limiting.

In my clinical practice I’ve met with teens who are extremely attached to their diagnosis and the limits it brings that moving on through it — learning to manage it — feels like giving up a part of themselves.

If their anxiety diagnosis has made them feel special and unique, if it’s been something that’s had a number of accommodations, such as people who are extra careful with that person. Like if a friend says, “Oh I’ll go and ask the teacher for the assignment because I know you have anxiety” then that’s a lot to lose.

Part of our work in therapy is helping kids who are having this experience to see that they are more than their anxious functioning and that learning to live with it will expand their lives so it’s ok to lose some of the protection and safety of identifying with an anxiety disorder.

Now when families are targeting the pitfalls in parenting an anxious child, they are already doing this work because they are helping their child see that they may be anxious but they are also brave. Things may be more difficult sometimes but they have the strength to overcome those difficulties.

In other words, when we are learning to support our anxious child, we don’t need to worry about them becoming too attached to the idea that they are unable to function due to their anxiety. There is no danger of letting them know that they have an anxiety disorder or — if they don’t have an official diagnosis — they they struggle with anxiety.

In fact, I would argue that telling them this truth can be empowering.

Letting a child or teen know that there are words for what they’re dealing with and that the feelings they have are real is one of the first steps in learning to manage anxiety. This is part of cognitive behavioral therapy where we learn about anxiety — how it works, how it limits us, what we can do about it. In my experience, most kids feel relief to find out that there is a name for what’s happening to them. Helping them understand that anxiety is a part of is — not the full sum of us — is important. It validates and normalizes their experience.

Lots of people have anxiety. And lots of people have wonderful lives in spite of it. That’s because we can learn to run anxiety so it doesn’t run us.

So how do we tell our kids?

We tell them by explaining that anxiety is normal, everyone has it, but some of us are more sensitive to it than others. Some of us are highly tuned in to things that seem threatening. When those feelings get too big for us to handle and begin limiting us from doing the things we need and want to do, that’s called an anxiety disorder.

What that means is that the anxiety is getting out of hand.

I always tell kids that having a little anxiety is a good thing because it’s what reminds us to look both ways before we cross the street. But having too much anxiety may make us not even want to try crossing the street; that just feels way too scary. We need to learn how to talk back to our anxiety so we’re not always stuck staying on one side of the street.

For teens, obviously the explanation can and should be more sophisticated. The teen years are an anxious time anyway. It’s hard to go from child to adult — the social stressors are so much worse, the expectations can feel over demanding, worries about an adulthood in a world that seems to be coming undone is a lot. I’ve said before that anxiety is an existential crisis and that’s especially true for teens who are already in an existential crisis. That means they’re trying to figure out how to be a person and the anxious teen is also learning how to tolerate the intense discomfort of worrying that they’re not capable of figuring out how to be a person.

As parents, we may unintentionally contribute to this existential crisis by getting on board with their worries about grades or friends or getting into college. Doing this is an accommodation. It’s saying to them, “You should be freaked out about all of this. Your anxiety and angst about it is warranted.”

That’s incredibly tricky for parents but I think for teens especially we need to focus more on coping, we need to focus more on anti-anxiety skills, and we need to let the future work itself out. This might means letting go of specific college plans and remember that there is no expiration date on getting a degree. It might mean being open to a child who misses out on some opportunities while we focus on baby steps to access others.

And that can mean prioritizing learning the anti-anxiety coping skills including education about what it means to have an anxiety disorder and building an identity that is inclusive of this without being exclusive of all the other aspects of who they are. Ironically when we work on becoming an anti-anxiety family, even though our focus on anxiety becomes more explicit, it will actually be less central to our family functioning. That’s because the family will no longer be consumed by accommodations and will instead be creating a family culture of facing and managing difficult feelings.

If you have told your child that they have anxiety and if you’ve noticed them saying things like, “I can’t, it’s my anxiety.” Or explaining that their anxiety is preventing them from doing something or you find yourself doing this, then that’s a pitfall. Anxiety as a shut door — a one and done excuse — is a pitfall. However if you notice your child saying, “I need a minute; I’m feeling anxious” or is using tools and explaining that they’re deep breathing or fiddling with their shirt buttons because they’re anxious, then that’s coping. Anxiety as an acknowledged bump in the road is a reason. That’s not a pitfall even if it feels sticky. Anxiety may slow us down but it doesn’t have to stop us.

None of this — learning to cope, wrestling with the reality of it, accepting our anxious feelings and understanding we must cope with them — can happen if we’re not explicit about what we’re dealing with.



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What do I need to teach my child about anxiety?

Podcast

Last week’s podcast episode, that’s number 60, how do I find time to work on my child’s anxiety, I talked about anti-anxiety skills and techniques and how it’s important that we learn them so we can teach them to our child and a listener wrote me after to ask more about this. They wanted to know what I meant by skills and techniques.

Ok, so tackling child anxiety has two basic pieces. The first piece is about confronting the anxiety itself. And that’s the Parenting Pitfall piece. That’s where we need to learn how to parent our specific child to help us stop avoiding the things that make them anxious. I’ve talked a lot about that.

The second piece is learning the cognitive behavioral tools so your child understands and learns how to manage their anxiety.

Anxious people, anxious kids are gonna be anxious. If we are sensitive, a bit more negative — you know, like we can spot potential problems before they even show up. This would be someone who always has a Plan B because they’re worried Plan A might work, or someone who tells you all of the reasons why things are likely to go badly. Anyway, if we have a brain that’s prone to anxiety then anxiety is going to be part of how we operate. Instead of trying to eliminate anxiety, we need to understand it — understand how it works, how it shows up for us — and we need to know what to do when we’re feeling it.

Both of these things — not avoiding anxiety, also called exposure and managing anxiety — are necessary. Learning one without the other is incomplete but that doesn’t mean you have to be learning both simultaneously. It’s more like you start chipping away at it wherever it feels most accessible. Which is what I was talking about last week.

We need to learn them first and figure out how to make sense of them so that we can interpret them for our children. And they also need to become sort of embedded in our thinking and in the way our family operates. We often segregate big discussions but I want you to understand that anxiety is a way we operate and so we can’t segregate anxiety work to a once a week thing. Anxiety is not a Topic with a capital t; it’s a way of functioning and that’s how anti-anxiety needs to be, too.

Think about other values that are automatically practiced in your family like living out kindness by saying please and thank you or living out responsibility by prioritizing homework or whatever. These value practices might be so automatic that you don’t notice them unless you visit someone else and you realize, oh so not every family greets each other when they get home. Or not every family has a chore list. A value of anti-anxiety needs to be practiced. It needs to become a way of functioning. First we learn it, we learn how to enact it in our family, and then we practice it.

Let’s discuss more what those skills, those cognitive behavioral tools, look like.

I’m going to use the section headings from my CBT Family course in the membership to illustrate this. It’s important to know that in real life these skills aren’t so neatly classified. They overlap each other and they build on each other. But this will give you a general ideas.

Section 1 Understanding Anxiety

We need to know how anxiety shows up for us. How does it show up in our bodies, how does it work. We need to be able to spot and label it. Remember anxiety is not danger but it can feel and look like danger. Understanding the difference is a big part of learning to overcome it. 

Section 2 Feelings Literacy 

I meet lost of people — kids and adults — who struggle with knowing how they feel. But recognizing, labeling and learning to handle our emotions is an essential part of resilient functioning. This is also important as part of that first bit of understanding anxiety. Because anxiety can sometimes feel like anger — anxiety can make us irritable and it can also make us meltdown and it can also feel like sadness — we may feel anxious that no one likes us or that we are failing, which can make us sad.

Section 3 Self Esteem/Self Concept 

Self esteem is what we think other people think of us and self concept is what we think of ourselves. Lots of anxious kids struggle with self esteem as just part of that anxious functioning. They may worry excessively about what other people think or their negative emotional bias may make them assume they know that other people don’t think well of them. And with self concept, the anxious child needs to start believing in their ability to face and deal with their anxiety. This can be a chicken and egg thing. They may need to feel strong to face anxiety but they may need to face anxiety to feel strong.
Section 4 Calm Down Tools 

Lots of families start here. Most families I talk to have done some calm down practice, especially deep breathing. But starting here is putting the cart before the horse. These are important skills for sure but they are absolutely not the be all end all of anxiety. Just calming down is not enough to bring to the anxious table.

Section 5 Understanding Thinking 

This section is meta cognition, which is thinking about thinking and this is some big philosophical work. Little kids aren’t going to be able to do this, they’re just not going to have the developmental capacity. But that doesn’t mean you can’t get ahead of that. This is hard work even for adults and it can bring up a lot of different feelings, which takes us back to emotional literacy. See what I mean about how this builds on itself? Don’t let that discourage you though because Understanding thinking is a lot of fun, too. Or at least it can be and it’s definitely something we relearn in new contexts.

A basic example of this is learning that story The Blind Men and the Elephant. There are picture book versions of this so I’m hoping it’s familiar but the gist is several blind men come across an elephant and they all experience the elephant differently. One gets a hold of the trunk and thinks an elephant is like a snake, one gets a hold of the ear and thinks the elephant is like a fan. One gets a hold of the leg and thinks an elephant is like a column. Anyway, That’s thinking about thinking, understanding that our perspective defines our reality and not always accurately.

Section 6 Shifting Attention 

This is about learning how to distract ourselves when anxiety threatens to take over. These are mindfulness tools, giving ourselves space to appreciate anxiety from a distance. This has overlap with calm down tools, it has overlap with meta cognition. And of course feeling literacy and understanding anxiety. These are powerful skills and again, take practice.

Section 7 Exposure Tasks

Eventually as we get better at staying out of the parenting pitfalls, our children will be able to take over designing exposure tasks or recognizing opportunities to confront their anxiety. This is also a skill and it’s based on all of the other skills. At the beginning exposure tasks may be fairly formal — if you join and take the Strong Kids Strong Families course you’ll see how confronting pitfalls is at first organized and formal — but as we get better at spotting them and confronting them, it can become second nature. That’s what those tasks are about.

You of course can find ways to teach these skills to yourself. You can buy some of the anxiety workbooks and looks hem over — they’re generally organized like this but might use different names or break things up a different way. These are also the kinds of things you’re likely to learn in therapy. 

And there is CBT Family inside my membership.

I hope this has given you some ideas about building those anti anxiety values and practices into your family. I welcome any specific questions you. Might have. 



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How do I find time to work on my child’s anxiety?

Podcast

This is a question that every busy parent has to ask themselves and thinking back to my most intense parenting years, I hear your screams, friends. Oh boy do I appreciate how many plates you’re already spinning and how fast they have to spin especially when you’re parenting an anxious child.

Let’s be frank, you’re not going to be able to find time because most of you are already over scheduled, over booked and over whelmed. It’s the nature of the parenting beast. So the answer to this question is more complicated than just revisiting your schedule.

When we think about working on our child’s anxiety, it’s easy to think about it as a separate curriculum. A thing you make time for, an event you schedule. But the most effective work is one that you integrate into your day to day life. Yes, most of us will eventually need to have a plan — a concrete step by step of figuring out what to do next — but that’s a lot easier when you have things already in place.

Think of it like cooking. Cooking is easier by a lot when you do the preparation.

     

      • You go to your recipe box or click to your favorite cooking site

      • You choose what you want to make

      • You make a list of the ingredients

      • You go to the store and get them

      • You prepare everything — chop the onions, wash the greens, debone the chicken — and get out all of the equipment

    Oh yes, we forgot about the equipment because you also need to have the appropriate pan and knives, etc.

    Then you cook. And when you’re first learning to cook, you make mistakes. You don’t know what medium heat means on your stovetop of you are still working on your knife skills.

    Once you’ve been cooking for awhile you can wing it. You know how to make last minute substitutes or how to throw together a dinner based only what’s in your pantry. You may not need recipes or you may have figured out how to adjust the recipes you have to suit your family’s tastes and budgets. You know which meals you can make quickly and which are the ones to save for special events.

    You get better at it by learning and by practicing.

    Most of us don’t have time to take cooking lessons — formal once a week events that we block out on our calendar — instead we kind of learn as we go. And we have to learn if we want to be able to expand our palates beyond whatever uber eats or Lean Cusine has for us. Not that there’s anything wrong with take out because sometimes that’s all we have time or space for but if we want to save money or eat in ways that serve us body and soul more or just more to our preference.

    Managing child anxiety is like that, too. Right now you might be spending more energy on NOT managing the anxiety — or more specifically managing it in ways that don’t serve you or your child or your family as well — and you’re going to have to make a shift in how you think about it.

    Now, you can take cooking lessons for anxiety. You can join a program like mine or grab a book or workbook and you can do the things. You can devote an hour each week or even more time and work your way through it. And that’s great. That’s a great way to do it. 

    But most of us are going to do it in more messy ways, which is why I designed my program the way I did. Most of us are going to dip in and out. We’re going to join the program or grab the book and we’re going to dive in and then we’re going to set it aside. We’re going to forget about it a little bit. We’re going to feel overwhelmed and guilty about not tuning in more and that will make it even harder to return to it.

    Let me assure you that it’s ok to be messy and in fact I think it HAS to be messy to be effective.

    Learning to manage your child’s anxiety is a lifelong learning. It’s full of paradigm shifts and self growth and you’ll need to become an expert on a lot of different topics like anxiety in general, and your child’s unique development, and specific tools and techniques that you can pull out at different times and in different contexts. 

    I designed my program thinking of this messiness as a feature not a bug. There is the asynchronous step by step course, Strong Kids Strong Families, and it’s asynchronous so you can get it whenever and wherever you need it. But there are other opportunities for learning, too. There is CBT Family, which are the skills and techniques to bring cognitive behavioral tools to your family. Those are things you can dip in and out of. You can bring those in as slowly as you like wherever you might be in the Strong Kids Strong Families process. And then there are some people who basically use the membership in order to contact me and ask me questions and directions about their particular child. They may not use any of the courses at all at first, they’re just messaging me and that’s fine. I will direct them to where I think they might need help.

    In short, I designed this as a membership and not a static course were you pay once and forget about it because I wanted members to start thinking of it as a companion. And as a commitment that is flexible to meet their needs.

    You do not need to have set aside time but you do need to be willing to come by and check things out or check in with me. Then as you grow in your understanding of how anxiety works, it becomes easier to see ways to adjust things.

    It’s a little like one of those meal kits, where you get to ease your way in. A lot of it is done for you, you can give feedback or ask how to make it more personalized and eventually you take the confidence you’ve gained through the meal kit and into your own menu.

    I think this metaphor works. 

    Anyway, if you’re struggling to figure out how to find time to manage your child’s anxiety, I encourage you to consider just starting with learning more about anxiety. This podcast is a good place to start — dive into some of the archives. The more you learn, the more you will know your way to go. So just keep learning. 

     

     

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    What do I do when my child doesn’t want to deal with their anxiety?

    Podcast

    This is a really great question because a whole lot of us — not just children — don’t want to deal with our anxiety. We may not realize our anxiety is even a problem. We might not even know that we HAVE anxiety. We might think that this is just the way that we function.

    That wouldn’t be an issue if our anxiety only impacted us. But what we know from the research is that those of us with anxiety that is left unaddressed or untreated tend to pull on our loved ones in ways that hep us avoid the things that make us anxious.

    In fact, when you dig into the scientific literature around anxiety accommodations, which is the term for the pitfalls we get stuck in with our kids, you’ll see that many of those studies were looking at accommodations within couples particularly around OCD. This is all to say that anxiety is an issue in relationships and child anxiety is always a family systems issue.

    This can be confusing because we are seeing our child struggle with this problem and so of course we say, “I need to intervene with my child. I need my child to change.”

    But actually we need to change.

    That’s good news. It may feel like rotten news like, “I’m screwing up” but you’re not screwing up. It’s just how anxiety plays out. 

    Think of it this way. If you have a child who is allergic to eggs and you’re the person who does the grocery shopping, menu planning, snack providing, you are going to have to figure out eggs. You’re going to not buy eggs, you’re not going to make omelets for your child, you’re going to need to get that recipe for wacky cake, which is the cake that uses vinegar and baking powder for leavening so that you don’t need eggs. That’s because your child may be the one with allergies, but you are the adult who actually controls the general overall function of how the house eats.

    Maybe that’s not such a great example since with allergies avoidance is the right thing to do and in anxiety it is NOT the right thing to do.

    Oh well, I hope you get my point.

    So it doesn’t matter if your child doesn’t want to deal with their anxiety because we are going to focus on our own behavior.

    It is both easy and difficult to make this shift. It’s easy because the only person we have to deal with is ourselves. We get to unpack our often complicated feelings about our child’s anxiety, to address our worries about their worries, and to learn the tools we’d like to pass onto our children. It’s difficult because we care a lot about how our kids are doing. It’s challenging to unhook ourselves from our want for things to be easier for them. And it’s difficult because letting go of attachment to results can feel neglectful. 

    What we need to remember is that over attention to our child’s anxiety is what is keeping us stuck. Wrapping our family functioning around their functioning tends to be insidious. It creeps up on us, it has deep roots. Often I talk to families who say, “No, we are not stuck. We are ok. We are doing the things we need to function and they’ll point to one particular challenge. One particular big emotion behavior.” But it’s’ very much an iceberg kind of thing where that one particular behavior or problem is just the one we’re seeing but there are many more that the family has just become accustomed to.

    It takes time to pull back and fully consider the ways we — the parents — have become trapped in our child’s anxiety. And then when we start to realize it, we may find ourselves feeling defensive and wanting to explain why it’s important that we do those things and why we need our child to change. 

    We might feel we can’t shift until our child agrees to work on their anxiety because we feel so tangled up in it. 

    If you feel like you can’t make a move until you have your child’s buy in, until they are willing to deal with their anxiety, that tells me right there that you’re stuck in Pitfalls. No shame there. 89 to 97% of all parents of anxious kids — depending on which study you read, some say 95 to 99% – are stuck in pitfalls. You’re in good company. But we are the ones who are stuck so we are the ones who will need to get unstuck.

    If you feel super tangled, if you feel super stuck, if you feel like there is no way you can work on this without working on your child, that’s all right. It means that you’ll probably need to go slower as you learn more about child anxiety and more about how to uncover and address the ways you are stuck. This isn’t a one and done deal. This is a process and it takes time. But once you’ve begun it and you really understand it, and you know how to work your way through it, you will never be that stuck again because you’ll be able to apply and reapply what you’ve learned every time you look around and say, Dang, we’re here again.

    It’s not the getting stuck that’s the problem — any of us with anxious loved ones will get stuck now and then — it’s recognizing it and knowing how to get unstuck. When we do that, our loved ones will get unstuck, too. That’s just how it works. That’s just how family systems work. You change and that creates change in the system, which requires change from other members. This is essentially the core of child anxiety treatment. The rest is about learning skills and bringing them to your family. You can do that. Even if your child doesn’t really want you to.



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    Does my child have social anxiety or are they just shy?

    Podcast



    I really like this question because I think it can be confusing. If you listened to the previous episode e about why encouragement doesn’t always work for anxious kids (that was episode # 48), we talked a lot about temperament, particularly about the slow to warm temperament. And temperament is what we’re also talking about here.

    Some kids are more shy than others, meaning that they take more time to warm up in social situations. Some kids are more introverted, too, which means that they don’t need as much social stimulation as other kids. They may find social situations more of a drag on their energy and so these children and teens may have fewer friends.

    And that’s fine.

    It’s fine to like being alone, it’s fine to hang back in social situations until we are comfortable, and it’s fine to enjoy one or two close friends rather than to want to hang out with a crowd.

    It’s all fine.

    Shy children, introverted children are living out a preference. They prefer smaller situations. They prefer to come to things on their own time.

    They may like a big party but want to hang at the edges. Or they may have no interest in a big party but would prefer a celebration with just one good friend.

    Now socially anxious kids are NOT living out a preference. They want to be social — or at least more social than they are being — and are unable to because of their anxiety.

    Socially anxious children and teens may also be shy or may also be introverted and this can make it more difficult to tease things out.

    Let’s compare the two:

    A shy child will eventually warm up in social situations. A socially anxious child will continue to feel distressed and in fact their distress might increase.

    A shy child may prefer one or two close friends over a crowd. A socially anxious child may struggle with friendships, worrying that the friends they have like them or worrying that their friends are secretly upset with them even when they’re not.

    A shy child may be reluctant to attend a large social gathering but they won’t necessarily be avoidant. They may roll their eyes or grouch, but they’ll still be willing to go to the birthday party. The socially anxious child may panic and refuse to go or struggle to sleep the night before or repeatedly ask you if they can stay home.

    A shy child’s functioning is fairly consistent — you know which situations they prefer and which they don’t. A socially anxious child’s functioning likely gets worse over time if there is no intervention. They may be unpredictable, willing to attend a social event one day and then the next bottoming out and unable to get out of the car and head in to the party.

    The shy child would prefer to stay home. The socially anxious child struggles to leave the house. So there’s preference and then there’s ability.

    The shy child can push past their limits when motivated. The socially anxious child is trapped by their limits. It’s the difference between someone saying, “Ok, fine, I’ll do it” and someone melting down or beating themselves up because they can’t do it. 

    Shy child don’t have the performance worries of the socially anxious. 

    Let’s look at some examples and hopefully you’ll be able to recognize your child in one of these if you are wondering about their functioning.

    The first child is socially anxious and outgoing. They want to be part of the crowd. They are sorry to miss out on the school dance or soccer team try outs. They are unhappy not being a part of things but they are excessively worried about failing or about being made fun of or of not getting things right.

    The second child is socially anxious and more introverted. They may express that they are lonely. They may say that they worry that something is quote “wrong with me” end quote because they don’t know how to fit in. You may look back and see that they tended to smaller groups or just one friend at a time but now you are seeing them become more isolated.

    Now the child who is introverted but does not have social anxiety does not express unhappiness with their social life. I mean, they might complain now and then — we all sometimes feel left out — but generally speaking they have a solid friend or two, they are able to participate in things, they may not be joiners but if they want to do a thing with someone like go to the movies or have someone over — they’re able to do this.

    If you’re not sure, just think about how your child communicates about social events. Are they like, “ugh, fine, I’ll go but I won’t like it” or are they excessively worried, asking for reassurance, telling you how everyone is dumb or mean or will judge them. Is there an emotional component that you’re seeing, a digging in of their heels. Are things getting worse, is their social life getting smaller. Are they fretting about friend drama to the point that the drama is bigger than their friendships.

    You can also look at their functioning across their lifetime. Introverted babies may make less eye contact or be less interested in engaging with strangers. You know how babies often go through a period of flirting and being adorable with cashiers, shy babies aren’t interested in this. One of my children was shy but not socially anxious and as a preschooler when people would try to engage with him he would just point at me. He didn’t have trouble doing this — he didn’t cry or hide his face — he’d just point at me to answer. My other child was extremely outgoing but struggled with some social anxiety and this appeared later in life. The fact that it was different than her functioning at other ages pointed to it being an anxiety issue and not a preference.

    We see social anxiety crop up in kids when social demands increase. I see it around 8 or 9 especially for girls and I see it a whole lot in middle school. No wonder, right, because these are socially anxious times. Just because it’s developmentally typical doesn’t mean we should ignore it or assume they’ll outgrow it. Untreated anxiety tends to get worse and Kids who are prone to anxiety in one area are more likely to have anxiety in other areas, too. There are no downsides to learning anxiety coping tools.



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    Good kids are sometimes bad

    Parenting

    Young children, bless their little hearts, think their parents are perfect. It takes them awhile to realize what messes we really are but at the beginning, they think we’re All Good and so when they do things that are Not So Good they sometimes think it means they are in some way defective. After all, the adults who they love and look up to don’t seem to have trouble not spilling the milk or wetting the bed or remembering how to tie shoes. Kids are usually under the false impression that grownups are never deliberately bad. (As grownups ourselves we know that deliberately misbehaving is actually quite the grown up kind of thing — witness insider trading and and people who double park — but when our children are only noticing our stellar milk pouring skills, it’s easy to impress them.)

    When you’re little and you sneak a cookie or lie about brushing your teeth, it changes how you feel about yourself. You don’t have a broad enough worldview to know that being bad is part of being human and that misbehavior is something most of us struggle with on some level for our entire lives. Little kids tend to think very black and white, “I have done this bad thing therefore I am a bad person.” When parents react with shock or dismay when they discover a child’s transgressions, it solidifies that child’s self concept as “bad person.” That’s why it’s so important to reflect back the unconditional acceptance of the small person before us even when we need to condemn that same small person’s behavior.

    Keeping the focus on the bike left in the middle of the driveway (“Michael! Your bike!”) and not on Michael himself (“What is wrong with you? Do you ever think about anyone else? Do you think I like getting out of my car in the rain to move your bike?”) will perhaps help grown up Michael not cheat on his taxes. Grown up Michael will think, “I’m a pretty good person. I try hard to take responsibility for my mistakes and do the right thing. I think I’ll ignore my brother-in-law’s advice to claim the kid’s play room as my home office.”

    Positive discipline: Saving your child from future IRS audits!

    One thing I encourage parents to do is to make a point of reconnecting with children after particularly bad days — the days when you feel like all you did was holler at them — by talking to them about the predictable developmental challenges that kids face. Little children are encouraged to hear that it will become easier to get things “right” as their maturity levels increase. It’s terrific when parents can say to a 3-year old, “I know it’s hard to remember to use your words when you are three, but someday soon it will be easier for you. Until then, I will help you remember.”

    Even teenagers are reassured to hear that their displeasure with the family is developmentally appropriate and that someday everyone will likely be good friends again.

    Knowing that your parents can see the good in you when you are having trouble seeing the good in yourself is a very big deal for growing kids.

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