How to Avoid Passing Anxiety on to Your Kids
Effectively handling your stress is important in preventing your child from feeling your anxiety. Once you've mastered stress management, you can teach those same skills to your children.
What you’ll learn:
How to cope with parenting stress
How to keep your child from feeling your anxiety
How to talk your child about anxiety
When kids see their parents feeling anxious a lot, they might start to feel worried too. They learn from their parents how to handle different situations. So, if a parent always seems scared or nervous, the child might think lots of things are dangerous.
Some kids with anxious parents end up feeling anxious themselves. This can happen because of genes and because they learn anxious behaviors from their parents.
If you're dealing with anxiety and notice your child feeling anxious too, it can be tough. But it's important not to blame yourself. Feeling anxious is hard, and you can't just switch it off.
But just because a parent is anxious doesn't mean their child will be too. There are things you can do to stop passing anxiety to your kids. You can learn to handle your own stress better and teach your kids how to manage theirs too. It's helpful to spot anxiety in your child early and learn ways to deal with it together.
Manage Stress with Mindfulness
It’s tough to show your child that everything's okay when you're feeling anxious yourself. When we're anxious, we worry a lot about what might happen in the future. To stop getting stuck in these worries, try something called mindfulness. Mindfulness helps you focus on what's happening right now. Here are two easy ways to try it:
Squeeze Muscles: Start at your toes. Squeeze one muscle tight for five seconds. Then let go and feel how your body changes. Do this for each muscle, moving up your body.
Belly Breathing: Put one hand on your stomach and one on your chest. Breathe in slowly, making your stomach expand like a balloon. Then breathe out slowly.
You can do these mindfulness exercises whenever you're feeling anxious. But it's also helpful to practice them every day. This helps you get better at using them when you really need to, and it can make you feel calmer overall.
Learn Your Triggers
It's important to notice what makes you feel anxious. Sometimes, feeling anxious is normal, but if we dwell on it, it can get worse. For example, if you always think the worst when you have a little cough, looking up symptoms online might make you even more worried. Similarly, if news or social media stresses you out, spending a lot of time reading them can make you feel worse. Setting boundaries about when and how you will engage with things that could trigger your anxiety is a good idea.
If your anxiety is really bad and you can't manage it on your own with mindfulness and setting limits, talking to a mental health professional can help. They can teach you ways to handle stress that work for you. And as you learn to deal with stress, you'll also be teaching your child how to handle tough situations.
Model Stress Tolerance
Once you figure out ways to deal with stress that help you, you can share them with your child when she feels anxious. For example, if you're learning to think logically when you're stressed, you can teach your child the same thing. You might say, "I know you're scared, but how likely is it that something scary will really happen?" or “I’m feeling really nervous, but that’s normal and I’m confident I’ll get through this”.
Even when you're working on handling your own anxiety, try to stay calm and neutral when you're around your child. Pay attention to your face, the words you use, and how strong your feelings seem, because kids notice everything. The saying that they are little sponges is still so relevant when it comes to emotions.
Explain Your Anxiety
You don't have to hide all your anxious moments from your child, but you also don't have to show them every time you feel stressed. It's okay — and actually good — for kids to see their parents deal with stress sometimes. But it's important to explain why you reacted the way you did.
For instance, if you got mad because you were worried about getting your child to school on time, you can talk about it later when things are calm. You could say, "Remember when I got really frustrated this morning? I was anxious because we were late for school, and I handled it by yelling. But there are other ways to deal with anxiety too. Maybe we can figure out a better way to leave the house each morning."
Talking about anxiety like this shows kids that it's okay to feel stressed and that it's possible to manage it. If we always try to shield our kids from seeing us sad, angry, or anxious, we're telling them it's not okay to feel those things or deal with them. We're also showing them that there's no way to handle those feelings when they come up.
Make a Plan
Think ahead and make plans for dealing with situations that make you stressed. You can even include your child in the plan. For example, if you get anxious about getting your son ready for bed on time, talk to him about how you can make it easier together. Maybe you can come up with a plan where he earns points for a reward every time he gets ready for bed without arguing.
But remember, these plans should be used carefully. You don't want your child to feel like it's their job to manage your anxiety all the time. However, when they see you working on specific ways to handle stressful moments, it shows them that stress can be handled and managed.
Know When to Disengage
If there are situations that make you really stressed, it's a good idea to plan ahead so you can avoid them when you're with your kids. For example, if taking your child to school makes you anxious, but you're still working on it, you can ask someone else you trust to do it instead. You don't want to look very worried or concerned when you're saying goodbye to your children. You don't want them to think going to school is dangerous. If you start feeling really overwhelmed by anxiety when you're with your child, try to take a break. Make a list ahead of time of things that can help settle your anxious thoughts and feelings. That way, if you feel yourself getting anxious, you can look at the list and implement the different strategies. These can be as simple as taking a bath, going for a walk, or just stepping outside.
Find a Support System
Parenting can be really tough, especially when you're dealing with your own mental health issues. But you don't have to handle it all on your own. There's a lot of help available online, like on blogs, forums, and social media. It's also important to get support from the people in your life, like therapists, co-parents, or friends. They can step in when you're feeling overwhelmed or just give you some encouragement. Be open with your support group about your anxiety, that way you can ask for help when you need it and they will understand how to better support you.
Additional Support
Navigating parental anxiety and its potential impact on children can be tough, but there are resources and support available to help. Tampa Pediatric Psychology offers valuable insights and strategies for parents seeking to manage their anxiety while fostering a healthy environment for their children. Through mindfulness practices, open communication, and seeking support from both online communities and trusted individuals in their lives, parents can prevent passing their anxiety to their children. Tampa Pediatric Psychology offers parent management training for anxiety and parent workshops for anxiety as well as individual therapy for anxiety offered online and in the Tampa Bay area. By prioritizing their own mental health and utilizing available resources, parents can develop resilience within themselves and their families, promoting a nurturing environment where both parent and child can thrive.