Positive Parenting: Understanding and supporting your child’s anxiety

ANIXEITY is our body’s way of letting us know that a threat to our safety is present and we may be in danger. This can be helpful as it allows us to keep ourselves safe and react how we need to in that moment. However anxiety becomes unhelpful when it is persistent over a long period of time, even when a threat is not present.

Helpful anxiety activates our fight, flight, freeze response in the face of danger. This response gives us the best chance of escaping the source of danger or minimising the threat. Flight response encourages us to run from the threat. Fight encourages us to face and fight the threat.

While freeze is our body’s response when we cannot fight or run so we freeze often mentally removing ourselves from the event. We feel these responses in our body physically and see them in our behaviour. Sometimes we might hit or kick out, sometimes we feel our heart race and breathing is shallow, and sometimes our body and muscles tense up.

These are perfectly normal responses by our brain and body. Unhelpful anxiety however, causes all the same physical symptoms and our behaviour can look the same but there is no threat present. It also happens more often or more intensely than we need it to. This is unhelpful anxiety as it no longer serves the purpose of keeping us safe, it impacts on daily life, and it causes distress.

We know our thoughts, feelings and behaviours are all linked. Typically anxiety affects how we think, what we feel and in turn how we behave.

Therefore, if we can change one of these, it will help elicit change in the others as well. When we are experiencing anxiety we typically focus on negative, unhelpful thoughts rather than positive helpful ones. These negative thoughts can include catastrophising (focusing on the worst possible outcome or situation), jumping to conclusions (coming up with an outcome or result without proof) and dismissing the positives (they don’t count or that was just lucky) among others.

These negative thoughts lead inevitably to increased negative feelings within us as a result. Negative feelings can include anxiety, low mood and even anger. Changing how we think about a situation (move from negative thinking to positive or balanced thinking) can result in less anxiety (feeling) and more helpful behaviours (less fight, flight and freeze).

Challenging negative thoughts and recognising the anxiety it is causing, both emotionally and physically, can allow us to break the cycle and move away from anxiety.

If you want more information about how to manage your child or teen’s anxiety, the Primary Care Child and Family Psychology Service are running a free webinar entitled Managing your child/adolescent’s anxiety on Thursday, March 28 at 10am. To register contact the psychology assistant on 087 3451489.

This article was written by Elisha Minihan, psychology assistant with the Limerick Primary Care Child and Family Psychology Service. Primary Care Psychology are a member of Parenting Limerick, a network of parenting and family support organisations. For more information go to www.loveparenting.ie.