Are You Enabling Your Child’s Anxiety?

As a parent, it’s not easy to see your child struggling with anxiety. It’s understandable to want to do everything in your power to help them and alleviate those fears and worries.

While support and encouragement can go a long way, there’s a fine line between helping your child’s anxiety and enabling it.

Let’s take a look at how you might be fueling your child’s anxious mind even more and what you should be doing instead to help them build resilience and allow them to learn to manage their symptoms. 

Perfectionism

It’s important to keep your child safe and guide them through life. But, too much corrective feedback can start to look like perfectionism, which can trigger anxiety. How many times each day are you correcting your child’s behavior over “little things?” 

Maybe you warn them not to put their cup on the edge of the counter because it could spill. Maybe you remind them to get their homework done right away after school. While these suggestions are well-meaning, the sense of urgency and concern can do more harm than good. 

Being Overprotective

As a parent, it’s hard not to want to protect your child from life’s potential threats. But that’s not always realistic. In fact, doing so could eventually cause them to become more anxious when they’re faced with challenges.

Don’t allow yourself to keep your child in a proverbial bubble. Instead, let them face challenges. You can help, support, and guide them along the way, but don’t keep them from difficult things. Let them fail, and be there to support them when they do. By taking a step back, you’ll teach your child to be resilient and boost their self-confidence, which will make it easier for them to fight back against anxious thoughts. 

Constant Reassurance

You might think that always reassuring your child that everything is okay would help with anxiety. For a time, it will. But, again, you can’t prevent your child from experiencing all of life’s challenges. 

There will be times in your child’s life when things aren’t okay. They will have to know how to deal with hardships, navigate circumstances, and more. If you’re always reassuring, they won’t know how to handle those challenges in healthy ways, making them even more anxious. 

Social Media

Social media seems unavoidable nowadays. While you can form your own rules about screen time in your house, consider limiting your child’s time on social media if they tend to be anxious. 

While you don’t need to keep your child in the dark about what’s happening in the world, unchecked social media time can lead to doom-scrolling and fuel their fears. Keep them informed in an age-appropriate way and be prepared to answer questions without letting them spend all of their time getting information online. 

What Can You Do?

Obviously, the last thing you want to do is enable your child’s anxiety or trigger their fear. Keep these common issues in mind and do what you can to strengthen and encourage your child without keeping them completely protected from the world. 

Additionally, consider reaching out to a mental health professional for help. By showing your child that they should prioritize their mental well-being from an early age, it’s likely to become something they take care of as they grow into adults. 

Therapy can help your child better understand where their anxiety comes from. You can learn more about it, too, as well as healthy and effective strategies to combat it. If you’re concerned that your efforts might be doing more harm than good, feel free to contact me to set up an appointment soon.