Help your anxious child feel better
Learn how to teach your child to manage their fears and worries
It can break a parent’s heart to see their young child frightened and scared – and it is doubly upsetting when we feel powerless to help. Over the past year there has been an upsurge in children experiencing anxiety and fears and there has been very little chance of getting any help. Even if help had been available, that would mean practical difficulties such getting your child out of school to attend appointments, risking making it a bigger deal by taking your child to a ‘therapist’, perhaps upsetting your child even more.
Even before the pandemic added to the toll, fifteen percent of children were thought to suffer from some kind of anxiety disorder, making it the most commonly identified emotional or behavioural problem. If these issues aren’t dealt with, they can lead on to problems such as avoiding school, trouble making friends and longer term problems with depression, for example.
What if your child could learn how to cope better with anxiety by talking to one of the people they love and trust the most, their mother or father? This is the basis of a new type of cognitive behavioural therapy, and the research indicates that it can be very effective.
Anxiety often comes about because we feel threatened, perhaps by something someone has said to us, or because a situation seems to be very scary. It is often our own brain’s interpretation of the situation, rather than the facts of the situation themselves, that is the problem. Two other factors contribute to anxiety. Our trust in our own ability to manage difficult, challenging situations, and the help we feel is at hand. This applies just as much to adults as to children. One way to manage anxiety better is to learn that yes, we can manage difficult situations by ourselves, yes, we can learn how to interpret a situation more realistically and yes, we are more resilient and stronger than we believed.
The new way of delivering help to anxious children is called Parent-led CBT and has been devised by psychologists based at Reading University. The way that it works it that one of the child’s parents attends sessions with the therapist and is guided through a discussion of how anxiety is affecting the child, how he or she is responding and behaving. Then, by helping the parent to understand what is causing the child’s worries and offering step-by-step practical strategies, the parent and therapist help him or her to overcome them.
Another benefit of this approach is that it can easily be provided online and over the telephone.
But this approach may not suit every parent or child. A different way of providing help lies with something called Emotional Freedom Technique, or tapping. Tapping is a type of therapy based on acupressure points that is very effective in reducing the stress and anxiety we feel in our bodies. Through helping our child learn the tapping points, or ‘Magic Buttons’ we can teach them how to feel better, whatever is troubling them. Tapping can even help very young children through using tapping with toys and stories (specifically personalised for the individual child).
Helping our children to deal with fears and worries will help them to grow into resilient adults and give them skills to draw on when things get tough. You, their parent, is best placed to help them with this.
At Changing Times Hypnotherapy I teach both of these techniques to parents. More information can be found in a recent blog I wrote or on my website, or simply get in touch and I can answer any questions you may have.
https://bit.ly/parledcbt
