Worried Kids: The Four E’s for Parents

In the last few years there have been lots of conversations happening around the rise of anxiety and depression in our children and youth. While I am grateful that there is more awareness and additional resources are surfacing, the presence of worry in kids is nothing new. 

If you don’t read any further, remember this: worry is a natural and normal human emotion. In fact it is an emotion that serves as a safeguard and is instinctual. So if you see worry sprouting up in your child take a deep breath and remember, worry is natural. However, when left unchecked or unmanaged (much like anger), anxiety can be destructive in our lives and keep us from doing the things that we ultimately want to do. Here are Four E’s for navigating worry with your child. 

Worry is a natural human emotion.

Evaluate: The first step to helping our children navigate worry is to evaluate ourselves. Children are a product of their nature and our nurture. They are like sponges constantly absorbing their surroundings. This includes how we as parents navigate unknowns. Even if don’t see yourself as an anxious person, worry can present itself in other forms, such as: controlling, particular, perfectionistic, helicopter parent, easily overwhelmed, frantic, reactive, protective or cautious. Has anyone ever described you by these words? Sometimes others can see our patterns clearer than we can.

Remember, everybody worries. It is not about whether we worry or not but rather how we navigate worry that counts. One of the very best and effective ways to help your child learn how to navigate worry is to attend to your own patterns around worry. 

It is not about whether we worry or not but rather how we navigate worry that counts.

Educate: Helping our children understand what worry is and how it makes our bodies feel can allow them to gain control over their emotions versus their emotions controlling them. Worry and anxiety are powerful emotions and can create physical responses in our bodies. When our nervous system is activated it can be an overpowering feeling. If we don’t understand how worry feels in our bodies it can be very convincing and lead us to believe that everything it is telling us is true. Start with educating your child on what emotions are, language to describe it, and then how it makes our bodies feel. This may seem obvious but often we falsely assume that because our children display big emotions they must also understand them. Simple descriptive language like, “It seems like maybe your tummy is telling you that you are feeling worried about school. Worry is when we feel unsure about how something may go and we start to feel yucky in our bodies. How can I help you?” A great daily tool for this is social-emotional children's books, as well as children's feeling charts. 

The goal is not to eliminate the discomfort, but rather equip your child with the tools and confidence to navigate through it. 

Equip versus eliminate: Although this is counter intuitive, we are not trying to eliminate their worry. The goal is not to eliminate the discomfort, but rather to equip your child with the tools and confidence to navigate through it. Worry is an avoider. It will actively work to convince us to remove whatever is causing the discomfort. If your child is anxious about going to school, they are likely going to try and get out of going to school. Often times our well-intended response as a parent is to say something like,“That won’t happen” or “You will be fine” in an attempt to eliminate the discomfort. But has someone ever told you “it will be fine” when everything in you feels like it won’t? That never helps right? Instead, we want to validate the emotion they are feeling, while also equipping them with the confidence to navigate the uncertainty. 

Encourage: Practice navigating unknowns in a low-risk setting and then celebrate your child when they successfully work through it. One of my favorite tools for practicing this at home is playing “Know and Don’t Know”. This is simply drawing a line down the middle of paper and listing what you do know and what you don’t know about an upcoming situation. For example, if you are making cookies with your child, ask them to list everything they know for sure about cookies prior to starting. Like, “they are delicious!” “They have chocolate chips in them” “They smell good.” Then on the other side of the sheet list what they don’t know. Like, “If they will burn”, “How many I will get to eat.” Then after you finish baking cookies, go back to the “what we don’t know” part of the sheet and fill in the results. In this exercise children learn to navigate tasks with unknowns in a low-risk setting. Ultimately, this is growing their ability to be flexible in a life filled with unknowns.

Lynn Lyons, anxiety specialist, says, “Anxiety is the over-estimation of a problem and the under-estimation of your resources to navigate it.” This is true for us and our children. Worry is an emotion we all experience. Worry becomes a problem when it begins to control us. Instead, start using the Four E’s as a guide to help you and your child navigate the unknowns we face in life. Much like a muscle, we have to regularly exercise it to stay healthy.

Interested in more support? Sign up for one of our WELL Workshops this Fall.