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Is it my anxiety or my child’s?

This week’s question is, is it my anxiety or my child’s? That’s a great question. And I’m going to insert that meme here, where the kid says, why not both? The truth is it can be difficult to tease out where the anxiety started. Do we have an anxious parent? Do we have an anxious kid? Is the parent anxious because they’re anxious about their child is the child anxious because they have an anxious parent. It’s very complicated.

So first of all, let’s explain that when we are talking about child and teen anxiety, we are talking about it in the context of a family.

And that’s because the research shows us over and over again that the family system perpetuates anxiety. We do not need to know if it is the parent’s anxiety or the child’s anxiety. We can just say there is anxiety in the family and it needs support. Now the people that are most in charge, most in control of how the family functions are the parents. Which is why we start the intervention with the parents. We work on helping the parents interrupt patterns of anxiety and as we start to unhook from anxiety, then we can work more directly with the child. All right. As far as is it your anxiety? Is that the child’s? I kind of feel like at the beginning, at least it doesn’t matter. So for example, I have many families who come to me and the child has anxiety with one parent more than the other parent and the parent who is not seeing the anxiety will often tell me, I think it’s the other parent.

I think the other parent is so anxious they make the child anxious. And I say, yeah, maybe, maybe that, that could be part of it. It’s still going to need the same kind of attention, which is we have to interrupt the pattern. Is the parent creating the anxiety in the Child, perhaps but it’s very chicken and egg.

You cannot look at something happening with the child and know exactly what’s happening in the family. It’s kind of backwards when we do that. So when we, when we’re working with a child and we say the parent is clearly doing it wrong, we’re ignoring the fact that maybe the parent is doing things in reaction to the child.

All right. We know that. We know from the research that parents of anxious kids get trapped in those anxiety patterns. We also know that some children inherit anxiety from their parents, both genetically; they have brains shaped for anxiety. And also because we teach them how to be anxious. For example, if you’re afraid of spiders, then every time you see a spider, you’re going to jump and act afraid your child learns, oh, I get it.

Spiders are scary. I need to be afraid of spiders that doesn’t make it your fault per se. It’s just the reality that we teach children how to function in the world. On the other hand, if the child is afraid of spiders and freaks out every time they see it. The parent will start being afraid of seeing spiders because they know it will create a reaction in the Child.

Then you’ve got both people kind of freaking out over spiders. And you can’t say, well, it’s the parents’ fault because they shouldn’t be freaking out over spiders. Any more than you can say, it’s the child’s fault because they’re freaking out over spiders. So let’s quit talking about fault and instead start talking about how do we interrupt that pattern? And that is through exposure designing exposures about spiders. And that might be getting some spider toys, some little rubber spiders, some toys spiders, reading books about spiders. Until the pattern is interrupted in a way. If you’re just working with the child with the rubber spiders, toys spiders, all of those things. And the parent is still reacting. Hey, are you okay? There’s a spider. Are you all right? Then you can see that’s not going to go very far with the child. We also have to work with the parent. We need to calm down your reaction to the spider.

We need to help you not freak out when you see a spider, whether that’s because you yourself are uncomfortable with spiders or because having a child who’s afraid of spiders has made you reactive to spiders. Am I making sense here? We do know, too, that the bigger your child’s reaction, the more outsized their child’s reaction, the more likely you are to get activated.

If your child has big behaviors in their anxiety, then you are likely to feel that more and to get more caught in those anxious patterns. By the same token, if you are a sensitive, anxious individual, then your family is also more likely to get stuck in anxious patterns. Which is all to say, it is not helpful to talk about blame and talk about how we got here so much as to talk about how do we get out of here. If you’re feeling guilty because you feel like you have brought anxiety into the family. Please let that go

and instead, focus on how do I figure out how to get out of these anxious patterns we’re stuck in? How do I learn to take care of myself around the anxiety? Because I guarantee that’s going to make things better for your child. The more you can take care of your anxiety about your child’s anxiety, the better. And sometimes when I’m talking to parents that go, I do not have anxiety.

This is all my child. But the fact they’re reaching out to me tells me they do have anxiety. They’re anxious about their child’s functioning and that anxiety while you might not think of it as well. I’m an anxious person. You do have anxiety within the relationship because naturally as a loving, connected, empathetic parent, you’re worried about your kid. And that’s the anxiety that we’re going to pay attention to

as we work on getting the family out of the whole anxiety pattern. I get it, that the focus is on the child because the child is the one everybody’s concerned about. The child is the one who may be seems trapped. The child is the one who’s maybe causing issues for the family at large. But again, we need to start with the parent. Once the parent understands the patterns.

Once the parent understands how they are perpetuating or trapped in the patterns. Once the parent understands that they do have anxiety, even if it’s just about their child’s anxiety, then we’re really going to be able to get to work. .As we work on the parent to extricate themselves, I promise you, the whole family will extricate.

It may not look like you expect it may not look like all of a sudden my child’s anxiety has gone; they’re coping, et cetera. But again, the more you focus on you and understand what’s happening. The more you pull out of it. The more, you’re going to be able to support your child. I hope this all makes sense.

Thanks for tuning in this week. Remember if you have a question you’d like me to address on the show, please go to ChildAnxietySupport .com/question, and you can post it there. Maybe I’ll address it on a future episode. I also wanted to let you know that I have a webinar called “Tell Me It Will Be OK: How To Talk To Your Anxious Child About Their Anxiety”

and you can register for that at ChildAnxietySupport.com /webinar. That’s free for you. I just want you to check it out and let me know if it’s helpful. If you’d like to learn more about me and my program and see if maybe I can help your family, please visit ChildAnxietySupport.Com.

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What do I do if my anxious child is bullying their siblings?

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Welcome to the Child Anxiety FACT podcast. FACT stands for frequently asked questions, and I’ll be answering your questions about child and teen anxiety. My name is Dawn Friedman, and I have been working with kids and families for over 30 years. As a preschool teacher, parent educator, family case manager, clinical counselor, and now is the facilitator of child anxiety support, a program for parents of anxious kids. Alright. Let’s get started. Hey, everybody. This week’s This question has to do with siblings and when anxious kids are bullying their siblings.

The exact question is, How do you balance accepting your child’s anxiety and helping them cope with it and not tolerate bullying their siblings? Well, that is a really great question, and let’s be really clear that helping someone with anxiety and Accepting they have anxiety does not mean accepting inappropriate behavior caused by anxiety. Now you know I’m a fan of Ross Greene who says kids do well if they can. And so, sure, We are accepting that our child is struggling to behave in appropriate ways and would if they could. That really speaks to how important it is that we help them do it. Let’s remember that anxious children generally aren’t feeling great about themselves. They’re feeling anxious about themselves, and they know when they’re behaving inappropriately. They start thinking of themselves as someone who does behave inappropriately. If you ask an anxious child, do you enjoy bullying their siblings? They might puff themselves up and say, yeah.

I’m a tough guy or whatever, or they might explain why their sibling deserves it. But trust me, most kids do not wanna be a bully. And when we offer them the opportunity to live up to our expectations, we’re also sending them the message that they can be better than they are. But how do we do that without shame? Right? I think that’s really what this question is about is How do I hold my child accountable for their behavior without creating shame? It’s a great question. Part of it is that we don’t shame them. We don’t say you’re a rotten person. You’re a bad person. We don’t say things like, How on earth can you behave this way? How can anybody behave this way? Instead, we say things like, I know you are anxious and I know you are anxious and you may not treat your sibling this way.

I know that you are worried and you may not speak to me this way. I know you’re upset and you may not trash your room. When it comes to bullying siblings, Our first reaction really needs to be to go towards the sibling who is being hurt. Because sometimes, the child who is anxious is Trying to get eyes on them, but this is not the way to do it. So we can say to them, you need to give me a minute while I check-in with your So you put eyes on them. Let them know, I see you. I will get to you, but right now, my attention is on the person who is being hurt or who has been hurt, whether that’s emotionally or physically. That’s another way that we hold our children accountable as we go towards the person who is hurt.

This is also helpful because very often in anxious families, a lot of the attention has necessarily been on the anxious kid, and the sibling may feel neglected or left out or why on earth do I not get attention when I’m behaving so well and my sibling is getting all the attention when they’re behaving poorly. So we put our attention on the sibling. We make sure they’re okay, and then we turn to the anxious child, and we explain to them that this is unacceptable, and they need to find another way to communicate. In gentle parenting families, we tend to be so great at seeing the emotion behind the behavior, which is wonderful, but we forget to pay attention to the behavior. It is okay and necessary that people live with consequences when they are behaving poorly. Consequences do not mean we invent a punishment. I’m against punishment, and then for consequences. What is the difference? Punishment is meant to harm.

It’s meant to make the child feel bad. It’s meant to make them, regret their decision. The focus is on, I’m going to try to create an emotional response in you that is negative. That’s punishment. Consequences are listen. People who behave this way don’t get access to these privileges or necessarily need to be removed. Not as punishment, but because if you can’t be safe right here in this family space. You need to go and take a break, take a breather, come back when you are capable of being with the family again.

I know people feel concerned about time out that that is pulling attention away when a child wants it. Sometimes time out’s not appropriate, but sometimes it is. I want you to think about your individual child, not some nebulous general child, and instead think, is this a child who needs away from the stimulation of the family? Who needs away from the attention? Is this a child who does better when they get some space from the situation? For that child, time out is better than time in. The other thing is time in, that is when we spend more attention with a child, does send the message, if you do a thing, you will get this result. It is a positive reinforcement to hurting other people. Don’t think about punishment. Think about consequences, and then Think about which consequences are sending an appropriate message to your child and helping them in moving forward in their growth and ability to not hurt other people. I mean, that can be a very basic rule in a family.

Right? We don’t hurt other people. Sometimes for some families, this may mean 1 parent will take a time in with the child while the other one is paying attention to the hurt child. Again, I want you to think about how do we do a time in without unintentionally rewarding the behavior. Now if you have listened to my podcast, you know I do not like to label children manipulative when really what’s happening is children have learned This is how to function to get something that I need or want. That’s not manipulative. That’s just smart. So do look and say, Am I rewarding this behavior? Is that the message that is going to serve my child? We are parenting for the future as well as right now. We are parenting to help support our child in growing into being their best selves as well as taking good care of them right now.

When we unintentionally reward behavior that is going to hurt the child long term, that is going to message to them that meltdowns and hurting other people and saying hurtful things is a good way to get attention. Does that really serve them? I would argue that it doesn’t, and so we need to figure out how to give them healthy limits that will serve them well in the future. So back to how do we take care of our anxious child, honor that they are operating as well as they can, and stop them from bullying their siblings. And that is we set the limit, and then we figure out how to create strong messaging that says we will hold this limit. It is going to take time. If you have a child who is very persistent in their behavior, someone who likes things the way they like them, When you switch it, you can expect the behavior to escalate. If you have a child who has big behaviors and you have been pouring a lot of attention into to trying to manage those behaviors, and now you are switching to focusing more on the kids who need it, withdrawing a little bit as an appropriate consequence, You can expect some of those behaviors to rev up again because the child is saying, wait. You usually put your eyes on me when I act up.

Maybe I need to act up bigger. Prepare for that, plan for that, and make sure you reconnect after. So when you pull back from your child and say, I need to pay attention to your sibling who’s been hurt, You need to take a breather. You need to get some space, whatever. They may rev up. You will deal with that. Don’t escalate it. Just stay focused on, I’m teaching my child these boundaries and limits, and it’s gonna take a minute.

And then afterwards, say, you know, we’re working on this Together as a family, we are going to keep working on it. I know that you are going to grow into your self control, and I am going to help you do that by holding these appropriate limits. I love you, and I believe in If you have a question you’d like me to address on the show, please go to child anxiety support.com slash question, and you can post it there. Maybe I’ll address it on a future episode. And if you’d like to learn more about my program, you can visit child anxiety support .com. Thanks so much, and have a great week.

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Can I parent so well that my child won’t have anxiety?

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The question this week is a subtext to so many of the questions that I get. People say what if I had done this, would my child still be anxious? Is it because I ddi that? Is that why my child has anxiety. And the gist of it is: Can I parent so well that my child won’t have anxiety? Is there a perfect way to parent? If I avoid all of the parenting pitfalls will my child never struggle with their anxiety?

Boy being a parent is so hard, isn’t it? Not just the lack of sleep, lack of time to yourself, the drain on your resources. No, the hardest part is how it feels when your child is struggling. Or how it feels when we are struggling as parents, as people.

Let’s just stop for a minute and acknowledge how fragile we can feel as parents, which is so hard since we’re supposed to be the strong ones, right? Didn’t you think you’d have it more together when you became a parent?

I remember as a kid watching my mom wrap presents and she was so good at it. And I wanted to be that good. I wanted my folds to be razor sharp. I wanted the tape to disappear like hers did. And I thought that it would be like that when I was grown. I thought that was one of the secret things that adults just knew how to do.

So imagine my surprise to hit eighteen and still wrap lumpy presents. Of course you don’t have to imagine your surprise because I’m sure you have your own stories of running up against your incompetence in some thing, some event where you realized, “rats, I’m the grown up and I don’t know what I’m doing.” And this is especially difficult and even painful when you come upon this within your parenting relationship.

If you struggled as a child, you will revisit that in your relationship with your own child. You may be especially vulnerable when they hit certain ages where you struggled. Or when they arrive at certain events that you found especially difficult. There may be aspects of yourself that you see in them that scare or worry you. Or aspects that you didn’t like in other people and then you see it in your child.

Parenting is indeed the most triggering thing you can do.

It will be tempting to think that there’s a perfect way of parenting where you can avoid all of that. You might look at other parents who seem to be having an easier time and think they have better answers.

So let me dissuade you of this notion.

Here are some truths, some facts, about the reality of parenting that I have learned in my 30 plus years of working with parents and in my 26 plus years of being a parent.

The first is that, some kids are harder than others. That’s just a fact. Some parents have it easier not because they’re better parents or have made better choices, but because that’s the luck of the draw. They got a child who is objectively less demanding and/or a child that meshes with them in ways that makes parenting easier.

The second is that parenting is a job and sometimes jobs aren’t fun. You can love your kids and not like the job of parenting. You can love hanging out with a toddler and struggle with a ten year old or vice versa. Parenting is a job that changes because your child is growing and changing and you are growing and changing and sometimes you will have bad days. IT’s also a job that you learn as you’re doing it which means it’s inevitable that sometimes you’ll have to course correct. I think a big part of effective parenting is being willing to change it up because it’s not working.

The third fact about parenting is that your child is not an accurate representation of what a good job you’re doing. This goes back to that first one about some kids being easier. Sometimes you can do everything quote unquote right and your child will still be a mess. Great parents can and do have children who aren’t always doing great. Sometimes your patience and your wisdom won’t show. People will look and say, “I would never let them get away with that” but the truth is, they don’t have your child and they don’t know.

The fourth thing is that your child is the protagonist in their own story. They’re starring in their own show. You are the protagonist in your story and starring in your own show. Once you realize that — I mean, really realize that — you’ll understand that even though you feel very consumed with what’s happening to you including your experience of being a parent, you’re a supporting actor in your child’s experience. Their story — their narrative — belongs to them. At the beginning when they’re an infant, we are enmeshed. We are almost the same people. Because babies, especially in that first year, are relying on us so heavily, that it’s easy to get confused. Where do we leave off and where do they begin? Sleep, feeding, even for the tiniest infant whether they’re on their front or their back is all up to us. But as they get older it becomes and more clear that they have their own movie to star in. They’re in their own cinematic universe and we’re just like backstory.

All of this is to say that our child will have their own experience and functioning and preferences and personality and mental health. And we are there to support them.

Which means some of them are going to have anxiety no matter what we do. Anxiety is born and made but it can’t made — that is to say, we can’t force a non-anxious child to be anxious — if they don’t;’ have a brain that is shaped to be anxious.

We can take kids who go through the exact same experiences and one will come out with an anxiety disorder and the other will not. It’s just the way the cookie crumbles.

What we can do is figure out how to support them. Remember it’s their movie, right? So this is part of the narrative they are going to explore and grow through. How do we help them do that? It’s not about us being good or bad parents, it’s not about us saving them from the trajectory of their lives. It’s about being the best supporting players that we can.

And in our own show, in the story that we are starring in, its’ about learning how to uncover our own strengths, confront our own challenges, grow through OUR narrative in being parents to these particular people.

It’s not about whether or not you can parent so well that your children don’t have anxiety. That’s not the right question. It’s’ about here is what we are doing together. Here is where we stand. How do I help you? How do I become the parent that you need and that I am meant to be?

How do I take my experience as a child and bring it to this experience as a parent. How do I confront and consolidate my past so that I can get out of the way of your future. How do I learn to heal parts of myself without visiting my own expectations on you.

Big work. This is big works. But it is work we are meant to do. I have faith in you. I have faith in your child.

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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.

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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?
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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 »

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

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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.

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

Does mindfulness help child anxiety?

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Mindfulness is a big buzz word these days especially around anxiety and I appreciate the opportunity to talk about it here so thank you to the listener who sent this question my way. They asked not only “does mindfulness help child anxiety” they also asked, “And if so, how?”

All right, first let’s define mindfulness and for this I’m going to head to the Oxford Language dictionary and share the second definition, which describes mindfulness as “a mental state achieved by focusing one’s awareness on the present moment, while calmly acknowledging and accepting one’s feelings, thoughts, and bodily sensations, used as a therapeutic technique.”

I’d say that’s pretty dang accurate so that’s the definition we’re going to go ahead and use for this episode.

Now let’s go back to the question. Does that help child anxiety? Does achieving a mental state by focusing one’s awareness not etheh present moment, while calmly acknowledging and accepting one’s feelings, thoughts, and bodily sensations” help child anxiety?

Well, that depends on how you’re going to define help.

Lots of people when they first begin working on child anxiety are focusing on stopping the anxiety. They call me and say, “My child is anxious and I’d like to help them learn how not to be anxious.” Or they say, “I want them to learn how to cope” but as we dig into their situation it’s clear that the proof of coping will be the eradication of anxiety.

I get that. That’s the way I thought about anxiety, too, before I had my clinical training. That’s why we say things to our kids like, “You don’t have to be nervous” or “there’s nothing to be afraid of.”

We see tears or tantrums or meltdowns and we think, “Oh gosh, this is failing. My child is feeling their anxiety and something has to change.”

Mindfulness doesn’t mean not feeling. It’s right there in the definition. It means feeling and being aware of the feeling. It means noticing thoughts. It means noticing that your stomach hurts with worry. It means noticing that and accepting that, not necessarily fighting it.

When I say that, I’m curious. What’s your reaction? When I say, your child is just going to have to sit with that tummy ache. Or just sit with that feeling of wanting to run away. Or just sit with their anger that you’re not helping them. I imagine you’re feeling a lot of yuck. Noticing that yuck, noticing that perhaps you feel resistance to allowing your child to suffer, that’s mindfulness.

I think paying attention to the similarities of our experience with our child’s experience is incredibly helpful when it comes to child anxiety. So when I talk about mindfulness and child anxiety, first I want the parents to explore their anxiety. I want them to work on their own mindfulness skills because through that they will be able to help their child.

Let’s say our child is anxious about a new babysitter. You have plans to go out to dinner with your partner and you know you’ll be back kinda late. There’s a new baby sitter, you know them and you trust them — let’s say they’re your neighbor’s niece who is getting her degree in early childhood education. You trust your neighbor, you’ve talked to this young woman on the phone and you really like her, but you haven’t met her yet and neither has your child. You also know your child doesn’t like anyone else around at bedtime so you’re nervous.

You want to go out, you have special tickets to a big thing, a big show that you’ve been looking forward to. You’re excited to put on grown up clothes and eat at a grown up restaurant and see this show but you’re nervous.

You’re nervous that your child won’t talk to the babysitter. You’re nervous that they’ll meltdown when you try to leave. You’re nervous that the babysitter won’t be able to build any kind of rapport. You’re nervous that your child will be constantly texting you during dinner and during the show and if you turn your phone off or on airplane mode during the performance that you’ll miss an emergency call.

So you’re just kind of a mess about it.

Your mess about it mirrors your child’s mess about it. Your worry about your child’s worry is a helpful lens into what’s happening for your child.

If you can take care of your worry, you will be helping your child to find a way out of their worry.

Let’s bring mindfulness into it.

Mindfulness doesn’t mean that you ignore your worry or distract yourself away from it. It means you sit and you notice it. You don’t do anything else. You don’t try to talk yourself out of it or try to manage it, you just notice it.

Noticing helps you step outside of yourself. You can try narrating what you observe, doing this literally can really help.

That might sound like saying out loud to yourself, “Wow, when I think about walking out the door, I can feel my breath get more shallow. I think my heart rate goes up. I catch myself trying to talk myself out of going or into going. I feel like my mind races.”

You could journal your way through it.

You could talk it out with someone who is willing to listen and not try to solve things.

In mindfulness, you allow yourself to be in two places at once. You have the experience and you NOTICE you’re having the experience.

You might feel yourself drawn to look back — like at the last time you tried to go out. Or you might feel yourself drawn to look forward — projecting into how the night might go. And when you notice that, you can bring yourself back.

You can say, “Ok, I’m having all of these feelings. I notice all of these sensations in my body AND I notice the feeling of the sofa cushion I’m sitting on, the rough fabric of my couch. I notice that I can hear the wind chimes outside or the traffic. I am aware that the light in this room dims when the sun goes behind a cloud.”

That brings us back to the present. We notice the pull away, and we notice that things here that bring us back.

So how does mindfulness help? It helps by letting us sit with the feelings until they pass.

There are different ways to be mindful. IT doesn’t have to be sitting quietly; it can be walking and tuning into the walking.

You know how some people think more clearly when they listen to background music? It’s the same kind of thing. You’re not doing mindfulness wrong if you do it differently than someone else. The goal is to be with feelings.

Movement can help us be in two places at once. It can help us look at our experience more objectively.

For some kids, especially anxious kids, it might be easier to be with a feeling when they’re moving. I used movement a lot in my clinical work with children. Asking them to sit with their feeling might be overwhelming but we could pace around my playroom or play toss or they could even cartwheel and then come back to whatever they were feeling.

Again, there’s no wrong way to learn how to engage with our feelings. Remember anxiety is about avoidance and the avoidance is focused on helping us NOT feel uncomfortable. But we do need to feel uncomfortable to overcome our anxiety and mindfulness is a tool to do this. It gives us the opportunity to step into being anxious, being uncomfortable and not running from those anxious, uncomfortable feelings. It’s fine to dip in and dip out. It’s fine to build up our tolerance a little bit at a time. Mindfulness does not have goal posts. It’s a practice, which means we practice it.

By the way, if you’d like some help in bringing mindfulness to your day to day, you can head to my site and take the Parenting Pitfalls quiz. AT the end you’ll have the opportunity to sign up for my free 7-day Get Yourself Grounded email course. Just go to Child Anxiety Support.com/quiz

Does mindfulness help child anxiety? Read More »

How do I address child anxiety that’s the result of trauma?

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I recently had a question from a listener whose child has separation anxiety after the death of a caregiver. I did reach out to this family privately but I wanted to cover this on the podcast as well.

Before the most recent DSM update, PTSD was listed as an anxiety disorder but as the field has become more trauma informed, it is now listed as a trauma and stress-related disorder and anxiety is recognized as one of the symptoms.

This shift recognizes that PTSD is not just a subset of anxiety and in fact anxiety is an adjunct of PTSD. The new diagnosis recognizes that the most pressing concern is to address the trauma. The anxiety may drive the behavior that inspires the intervention, That is, the child may be displaying separation anxiety and that’s the reason the family is seeking help but the underlying reason behind the anxiety is the trauma of losing a family member.

Let’s talk a little bit about trauma. It’s a word we use a lot and not always correctly. The DSM defines trauma as “actual or threatened death, serious injury or sexual violence.” You can see that’s extremely limited and doesn’t include the way we use trauma even in the therapy field. In the therapy field, we include broader upsetting or disturbing events so we might call a divorce a trauma or being fired from a job. Technically, per the DSM diagnosis, these would not be trauma although they would certainly be upsetting and deserve attention and care.

Now I personally have no interest in gatekeeping the word “trauma.” If someone tells me an experience was traumatizing for them, I’m not going to say, “Well, technically I don’t think you can claim that term” instead I’m going to offer support, right? But when it comes to figuring out what to do next and how to treat or address a situation, we do need to be clear about what is traumatic and what is not.

I mention this because I’ve talked to many parents of anxious children who are using the term “traumatized” to describe their child’s experience and this is making it difficult for the parents to address the anxiety. They are understandably concerned that pulling back from the Parenting Pitfalls and exposing their child to the things that make them anxious will further traumatize their child. They are confusing upset with trauma. And I think we need to be very clear that being upset is very different than being traumatized.

Let’s go back to that DSM definition of “actual or threatened death, serious injury or sexual violence.” The key here is threatened, which means that even if we weren’t in danger, we believe we were. Truly believed. This is a big concern about active shooter drills in schools. If children aren’t aware that it’s a drill, this can absolutely be traumatizing.

Now we’ll talk about the symptoms of PTSD — that is, post traumatic stress disorder — in the current DSM for children 6 and under.

For that diagnosis, the child must have been exposed to actual or threatened death, seriously injury or sexual violence either directly experiencing it, witnessing it happening to someone else, or learning that it did happen to a parent or caregiver. The DSM expressly states that this does NOT include media such was watching a violent movie or seeing an upsetting picture. Again, this is the DSM diagnosis and we are not saying that seeing a scary or violent movie would not be upsetting or disturbing.

If the child has this exposure history, then we look at symptoms. These would include intrusive symptoms like:

—Distressing memories that reoccur (sometimes the child won’t seem upset but will play repetitively about the event). When I worked at a shelter, many of the children would act out the police coming to arrest someone in their house over and over again.

—nightmares or dreams about the event. This could be a child who wakes up crying because they’re dreaming about the person who died.

—Dissociative reactions, also called flashbacks, where children act as if the event is happening again, and again this can be expressed through play.

—Distress when exposed to things that remind them of the event, like a child who gets upset driving through the intersection where they were in a car wreck,

And it would include symptoms of avoidance such as:

—Refusing to go into the room where that person died;

—Avoiding conversations about the trauma event.

—Disinterest in play or other activities that used to interest them;

—The presence of negative emotional rates like sadness or confusing or fear;

—Withdrawing socially;

—not being able to have fun.

Other symptoms might include:

—sleep disturbances;

—Irritability or anger so tantrums

—difficulty concentrating

—hypervigiliance, which is being super tuned in to the possibility of danger

—exaggerated startle response

You can see how this can be confused with anxiety since anxiety shares many of the symptoms. Sow hat’s the difference? The biggest difference is the presence of the traumatic event.

There are several treatments with a strong evidence base for young children with a PTSD diagnosis. These include Trauma Focused cognitive behavioral therapy or TF-CBT, Parent-Child Interaction Therapy and Child-Parent Psychotherapy. All three of these treatment modalities include the parents. The younger the child is, the more vital it is that parents are included in the therapy. This is because relationships mitigate trauma. EMDR or eye movement desensitization and reprocessing is also a recognized treatment for trauma and if you’re interested in exploring this, I would recommend that you contact EMDRIA at EMDRIA.org. Doing EMDR with children is a specialized skill and EMDRIA has high standards for the people who can be listed in their directory. Sometimes a clinician will take a weekend class and feel like they are ready to go and I just want to caution you about that. EMDRIA can help you screen for a truly qualified therapist.

Children heal best in the context of a loving, supportive, relationship with a caregiver who is dependable and trustworthy. If your child has experienced a traumatic event and you are seeking treatment, make sure that you are included in that treatment, whichever you choose.

Trauma treatment is meant to help the person process the traumatic event so they can move through it. Now I’m going to explain this super simplified but trauma glitches our brains. It gets us stuck. Note that the intrusive symptoms are all about the stickiness — nightmares, memories we can’t shake, being triggered back into our trauma response when confronted by a reminder, avoiding things that make us think of the trauma. Treatment helps us unglitch our brains. Children who may repetitively play out the traumatic event are trying to unglitch. They are trying to play through to understanding so they can let it rest. Sometimes they need help pushing through the stuck place in their play.

It’s important that the therapist a family chooses has specific training in trauma because inappropriate treatment can be retraumatizing. For example, our thinking used to be that people needed to remember the traumatic event. You’ll see that in movies where someone has a blank space in their memory and the big climactic moment in the movie is when they remember what happened. Actually not remembering can be protective and healing doesn’t always require uncovering those distressing memories.

Ok, back to the question that inspired this episode, How do I address anxiety that’s the result of trauma? And the answer is first address the trauma.

How do I address child anxiety that’s the result of trauma? Read More »

What can I do when I feel like I’ve failed my anxious child?

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You know, when I started this podcast I figured I’d do it for one year — 52 episodes and that would be it. But this is Episode 54 so I’ve officially gone past my goal and the questions that are coming in are more complex. Like this one. And of course the actual question has a lot more backstory, which I won’t share given that it is very personal, and I’ve tried to distill it into this one simple but complex question, which is What can I do when I feel like I’ve failed my anxious child.

Oh listener who posted this and who did not leave their email so I couldn’t respond personally, I hope you are listening now.

I’m sorry that you’re struggling right now and that you are hurting. Being a parent can be so painful especially when we are watching our children have a hard time. AS writer Sarah Payne Stuart: said, You’re only as happy as your least happy child.

I’m going to try to address this very big, very important topic in this extremely short podcast and I hope that I’m able to do it enough justice that you will feel comforted and more confident at the end of it.

First off, you have not failed your anxious child. The relationship between parent and child is one that is forever changing. It changes as they change, as we change, as life changes. And sometimes we are a step or so behind the changes that need to come.

I learned this for the first time when my son, my oldest child who is now 26, was two. This is when he entered what I call the bent banana stage. You know the one, the one where your toddler asks for a banana dn if you give to them and they fall on the floor wailing because the banana is the wrong shape or size or you started peeling it for them or you didn’t start peeling it for them. When my son hit that age I was totally unprepared and our days bounced from tantrum to tantrum. This beautiful relationship I’d built with him came apart like wet tissue paper. The worst day was when he had a meltdown in public and another person intervened and told me I was handling it wrong. That’s a whole story about a bagel and one day if we ever met in person, ask me and I’ll tell you the whole sordid tale .But as I left that shop in tears, totally ashamed, I felt like a terrible mother and I felt like a fraud because I’d been working with kids for about a decade and yet here I was undone by my toddler. I can close my eyes and put myself right back there and remember exactly how it felt to carry my screaming child to the car while this woman watched, my face hot with guilt and anger and grief and fear thinking, I’ve broken my kid.

Then my friend called, my friend with a child exactly one month older than my son, and said, “What in the heck is going on, my daughter has lost her mind.” And when we compared notes I realized, oh, he’s just 2 now and he needs a different kind of parenting than I’d been offering. I was still parenting him like a baby and he was letting me know that he was ready to be parented like a toddler. I had to learn a whole new set of skills.

This was a lesson I learned over and over again and every time we hit a snag — whether it was with my son or later with my daughter — and I started having that overwhelming feeling of frustration and guilt and failure I’d stop and say, “Wait, maybe it just means something needs to change.”

So I will ask you dear parent, who is feeling like a failure, I think it’s far more likely that you’re NOT a failure, that you’re a good parent in a relationship that needs to change. The pain and frustration you have, the struggle between you, is a sign that your child is demanding something different from you and you can do something about that. You have it within your power to go and figure out what to do next.

Do you get that reframe?

So many of the parents I talk to who are committed to parenting differently than they were parented — and there are a lot of us in the respectful parenting, gentle parenting, attachment parenting, conscious parenting, etc. community — Are super afraid of getting it wrong. In fact, so afraid that we might be causing harm that we are all too ready to beat ourselves up when we are unhappy or when our child is having a difficult time.

Parenting guilt goes with the territory, I don’t know any parent who’s going to feel like they’re 100% nailing this parenting gig all of the time. And when we slip and yell or read a parenting book that highlights our mistakes or see another parent handling a challenge with grace that we screwed up, we’re probably going to feel guilt.

But guilt is only useful when it helps drive change. Guilt that just makes us feel bad about ourselves is useless at best and harmful at worst. It’s ok to say, “all right, guilt, I’m going to do things differently so you can stand down now.” It’s ok to say, “I regret those mistakes but I’m going to forgive myself and honor my intention to do better next time.”

And then we can start putting the supports in place that will allow us to do that. That’s what I mean about finding the motivation to drive change.

A lot of parents I talk to feel guilty not just because of what they’ve done or haven’t done but because of how they feel. They feel guilty for not enjoying their child or not enjoying parenthood and let me just say, that you can love your children very very very much, you can be willing to lay down your life for them AND you can also not enjoy them because kids aren’t always enjoyable.

you can also not always enjoy parenting because the work of parenting — the day to day work of it — is not always enjoyable.

Parenting anxious kids is really hard. It’s hard to worry so much about them, it’s hard to feel derailed by them. It’s hard to have kids who demand so much. It’s hard to feel like you’re constantly failing. It’s hard to get whined at. It’s hard to deal with meltdowns. I mean, it’s not fun. It’s perfectly ok to want to run away from home sometimes.

I tell parents this all of the time — if you’ve worked with me before you’ve probably heard me say it — but there’s a whole genre of novels about moms who leave their families and there’s a reason for that, which is many of us have days when we’d like to run away from home. It’s ok to fantasize about running away and joining a circus instead of being a parent. Sometimes fantasizing about it is just the break you need to help you come back and face your tantruming child and your overbooked calendar and your messy kitchen and your endless to-do list once again.

I bring all of this up because sometimes the guilt about failing (I’m using air quotes here) is covering up a guilt we have about wishing we didn’t have these demands on us at all. And sometimes all of that guilt — all of that messy shame and worry and regret and fear — makes it really hard to know what to do next.

I meet a lot of parents who are overcompensating — like really getting entrenched in the parenting pitfalls — because they aren’t liking their kids very much and they feel bad about it.

So for example, a parent who goes out of their way to be gracious when their child is whining and dragging at them because they feel guilty for wanting to lose it. And I tell those parents, it’s ok to be human in the relationship. You don’t always have to be an instagram worthy parenting whisperer with your kids. If the relationship between you and your child is generally healthy, is generally loving, is generally strong then there is room for your imperfection.

There is room to get it wrong, realize it, and course correct.

There is room for you to go back and say, “I didn’t know and now I do and so I’m going to do it different from here on out.”

Getting it wrong, getting stuck in parenting pitfalls, feeling unhappy — is a sign NOT that you’re a bad parent or that you have a bad kid or that you’ve been doing a bad job, the sign is that something needs to change.

That’s it.

Just that something needs to change. And how else are you going to know that something needs to change except by becoming dissatisfied about the way things are right now. In other words, being unhappy in your parenting relationship or with your child is healthy and appropriate and NOT a sign of failure.

When I am working with parents, I start with the assumption that they are doing a good job. Because most parents are. And when I start with that assumption, I am looking for confirmation so I’m making a point of noticing that parents’ strengths and skills. Those are the things we want to tap into as we make change. I don’t start with what they’re doing quote unquote wrong because I don’t think in terms of wrong. I think in terms of, What’s working and what’s NOT working.

This is why I say that your parenting isn’t the problem; it’s the solution.

IF I went back in time to meet myself as the unhappy mother of an unhappy 2-year old, I wouldn’t say, “Wow, what a screw up. What a bad mom. What a mess!!” I’d say, “Oh wow, there’s a mom tuned in enough to know that this isn’t working and just needs some help in figuring out what to do next.”

I’d look at the good relationship we had up until that developmental turning point and know that the relationship was demanding change. My son was one of those kids who hit every developmental milestone like the Wile E Coyote running into a wall. Just slammed into it and every time I’d forget and think oh my gosh, I’m failing. I think I didn’t figure it out until he was about 10. I’m hoping you get to figure it out sooner. That change is hard, that change sometimes — well often, requires some measure if discomfort. It requires us to be uncomfortable enough to change.

So my dear listener who posted this question to me and anyone else who is feeling this way, you have NOT failed your anxious child. You are realizing that what you’re doing isn’t working and how wonderful that you’ve realized this because now you can look for supports and information to help you create change. That doesn’t mean your struggle is over but it does mean that you have begun the journey to better functioning and understanding.

True failure would be in denying your unhappiness or denying your child’s struggle and continuing to do the things that are not working. It would be continuing to treat a toddler like a baby when they are begging for help in growing up.

We growing parents, instead of seeing ourselves as doing things wrong, I wish we could reframe this as the inevitable course of changing parenthood. What you did and what you do works until it doesn’t and then you might be unhappy and your child might be unhappy. But you can change things. Let me know if I can help.

What can I do when I feel like I’ve failed my anxious child? Read More »

What derails child anxiety treatment?

Podcast

This week’s question comes out of several different versions of people who contact me and say they’ve tried to get their child help and it isn’t working or it hasn’t worked and they’re asking me what to do next. So I’m squishing all of these questions together into one to talk about the things that get in the way of child anxiety treatment.

There are five things we’re going to talk about. OK? Are you ready? Here they are: The five things that get in the way of child anxiety treatment are:

Information

Time

Trust

Fear

Bandwidth

Let’s go through these one by one.

The first is information or lack thereof. And that speaks to the misunderstanding that the child should be the target of anxiety treatment. There are lots of studies about child anxiety because it is one of the most common if not the most common reason why parents seek out mental health help for their kids. And those studies tell us that we should be targeting the parents because, as you know, if you are a listener to this podcast, the parents are the ones who are capable of shifting the way the family is supporting the child. The parents are the ones who can create exposures, which is to say can find ways to help their child face their fears. The parents are the ones who will be passing on and encouraging skill acquisition on the part of the kids. And parents generally are more motivated. When we target children, we are expecting them to be able to interrupt the patterns that we know become ingrained in families with anxious kids. That’s not realistic. And we’re expecting them to remember and use pretty complicated skills. But these skills are ones that they not only need to learn but they need to practice and relearn over time. If we teach those skills to the parents, they can remind their children and reteach them at each new developmental stage. Finally anxiety is a tricky beast that teaches us that to be safe, we need to listen to it. While parents may be ready for the child to do things on their own, the child may be perfect happy with the status quo. That doesn’t mean that kids like being anxious but it does mean they may be less motivated to deal with their anxiety and more interested in continuing to avoid the things that scare them. Parents on the other hand, are more likely to want the children to gain more independence and so are better placed to encourage their children towards that goal.

The second reason child anxiety treatment gets derailed is time. It does take time to unpack and examine family patterns and create a plan to address those patterns. It takes time to follow through with that plan. Anxiety treatment is not a one and done intervention, it’s something that unfolds over weeks. So there’s learning how to make the plan, making the plan, and executing the plan. A way to cut back on the time needed for this, is to get direction. A program like mine, where I’m available to answer your questions and give you feedback, can cut back on the time it takes to figure things out and then get the things done.

Third reason why child anxiety treatment can get derailed is Trust. Namely parents need to trust the plan, children need to trust their parents. The parents I work with tend to be gentle parents, supportive parents, parents who are in tune with their kids. It’s their super power and also the thing that gets them stuck. I know this because we didn’t call it gentle parenting back when I was raising my kids — we called it attachment parenting — but when you are so close to your children, it can be difficult to trust anxiety treatment because it does require us to put our kids in uncomfortable situations. So if we have an anxious child who is struggling to order for themselves in a restaurant and we see their tears and know they’re hungry and scared and here’s this nice evening out with the family and they are suffering instead of enjoying being at their favorite restaurant, we may so identify with them that we just go ahead and order. It’s hard to trust that making them do it is good for them when they’re telling us it’s not. Like, who do we trust? Our child who is telling us they’re not capable? Or this plan? No matter how much research is behind it, in the moment it can be hard to follow. This is why I think ongoing support is so important, which the research bears out. Parents do better when they have someone to help guide them, reassure them, remind them of the plan and help them figure out how to dial it back if needed or when to push even though it’s hard.

Ok, next barrier, next thing that can derail treatment is Fear. Not the child’s fear but the parents’. Lots of parents have tried to manage the anxiety and then have pulled back because they’re concerned that they are further harming their child. This is another reason why I like working directly with parents. I have found that if we expect parents to be the target of the intervention then we have a terrific opportunity to work with their parent on their own anxiety about their child’s anxiety. Just as we’re working with the child on exposures, on helping them confront the things they’ve been avoiding, so we need to do that with parents. And I think this is really exciting — this is the part of the work that I love the most, I think — because there is so much healing to be had in supporting parents who are anxious about their kids. Processing their own worries has such great lessons in figuring out how to help their children process their worries. I know that’s been incredibly helpful for me as a formerly anxious child who has an anxious kid. Anyway, our fear can derail child anxiety treatment but it can also be such an important key to progress.

Final barrier! That would be bandwidth. Parents are by definition busy and often overwhelmed with lots on their plates and I can appreciate that even if anxiety treatment feels urgent that it’s also difficult to find the bandwidth or the spoons or the mindspace to devote to addressing it. Am I going to explain how my program address this? I sure am. Let me explain how it works. The central workshop is Strong Kids, Strong families and that’s based on the Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions or SPACE program developed by Dr. Eli Lebowitz of the Yale Child Study Center. That’s a six week program — one lesson drops each week. SPACE is fairly straightforward. You do the things and you get results. That’s the information piece, the first barrier in this list is addressed via Strong Kids, Strong Families. The rest are addressed by the other parts of the Child anxiety Support membership. Now you can get in there, do your six weeks, solve the anxiety issue. But most of us have other barriers. I address the Time by making the site so accessible. It’s better than a weekly group because it happens on your time, at your convenience. You can get to the site on your computer’s browser but it’s even better in the phone app so it’s easy to find time to take the lessons, check in, talk to me, etc. The Trust piece and the Fear piece, those are addressed through the live components. Whether that’s watching the live webinars, or by coming to the live chats or office hours to speak directly to me in real time, or by private messaging me because I answer really quickly. Again, better than a weekly support group because the virtual piece of it means you can reach out to me whenever and I’m super available. The app makes that easy for me, too. I get a notification on my phone and check in to respond.

But bandwidth, how do I address that in the program? Well, I’ll tell you, it’s by using a membership model so that people can drop in, can go at whatever speed they want. You can rush through, you can go slow. You can start slow and speed up or vice versa. You can take a break and process what you’re learning, you can dip into other courses or resources that can help you figure out what you need to do next. You can tread water for awhile and then dive back in. You can hang in there and lean on the community supports. I’m there to encourage you even when you need to take a step back. You can drop in to Eve Hermann’s Stress Reset practices to give yourself some bandwidth, that’s why she’s there, to help parents take care of themselves so they can do this big work.

Yes, I’m obviously a fan of my program. And remember, if you’re listening to this in the last week of March 2023, we will be starting our spring cohort next week on April 3rd. If you join that week, you will join me in walking through the program. Child Anxiety Support is always available — you can enroll at any time — and the Strong Kids Strong Families piece is asynchronous. But twice a year — spring and fall — I’ll be offering it cohort style, meaning if you join then you’ll get the first week lesson at the same time as I go offer extra supports around that lesson, and the second week I’ll be talking about the second week and so on and so forth.

Just head to my site to join me and know that I’m here and the program is here whenever you need it.

What derails child anxiety treatment? Read More »

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What derails child anxiety treatment?

94 to 99% of families are stuck in patterns that make their child's anxiety worse.

Are you?

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94 to 99% of families are stuck in patterns that make their child's anxiety worse.Are you?

Follow Me

94 to 99% of families are stuck in patterns that make their child's anxiety worse.

Are you?