Understanding Children’s Anxiety, Worries and Fears

Anxiety is a normal response to a threat. Children also experience worries and fears as a regular part of their development. These emotions can arise from various sources and affect children differently based on age, temperament, and life experiences.

Some feelings of anxiety, worry or fear are necessary, even helpful. It keeps us safe and motivates us to take action or work hard to meet a goal. However, experiencing these feelings too often can affect our health and well-being. They can start to become a problem when:

• They feel stronger or last longer than you would expect.
• They come up more frequently or feel out of control.
• When they start to affect any aspect of your general well-being or everyday life, including but not limited to enjoyment, sleep, appetite, socialising, work, school or learning.

It is important to remember that unhelpful anxiety, worry or fear can be harmful, even when they don’t meet the criteria of a diagnosable mental health illness or disorder. Therefore, it is vital that anyone who experiences unhelpful anxiety-related thoughts or feelings receives appropriate mental health support, and early intervention is always the most beneficial approach.

Here are some ways that you can support your children when they experience these BIG feelings:

Talk to them about how they are feeling

Create a safe space so children can share their feelings with you if they feel worried, scared, or even excited about anything. Remind them that there are many ways that they can do this. If they don’t feel like talking, they could write, draw, or even use colours to express their feelings.  Reassure them that it's okay to feel every feeling and that there will be many other children experiencing the same.

Feel free to share your feelings in an age-appropriate way. Use this as an opportunity to reassure them and role-model coping strategies that they can use to help manage their feelings in healthy ways.

Get curious

Support your children in becoming thoughts and feelings detective® and spotting all the clues surrounding their anxiety, worry, and fear—working together to find out what’s happening inside and bubbling under the surface.

Avoid avoidance

When our children fear something, our natural reaction is to avoid the trigger rather than face it.

Unfortunately, this only reaffirms to our children that they should fear whatever they feel scared of, feeding the feeling and making it bigger. Instead, I suggest using active coping strategies to face the feelings of worry or fear, seeing how you can break the challenges and barriers down into smaller, more tangible steps to success—gradually working through the BIG feelings by making them feel less scary and overwhelming.

Prepare children for change through more than just words

Change can be difficult for any of us. As adults, we have so many different experiences that we can visualise what the new experience might look like when we think of change.

Children do not have this level of understanding, communication, or experience to comprehend even the slightest change, which is why even something small, like offering the blue cup instead of their usual pink cup, can turn a small child's world upside down.

They will understandably feel overwhelmed, so if you can imagine this feeling with their inability to understand or communicate their thoughts and feelings, you can begin to understand how scary the experience must be.

If we prepare children through images, objects, and sight rather than words, they will have a deeper understanding of what will happen. This will help them feel better prepared, and they will cope much better when the time of change comes.

Don’t put pressure on yourself or your child.

Any change or transition may take some time, and it is natural for both children and parents/carers to experience some ups and downs. Try your best to support, reassure and comfort your children and go through the motions together. Try to keep new exposure to experiences regular, short and positive. Set your children up to succeed, celebrate the process and every small win, and always work at their own pace.

Please feel free to seek support if you need it.

We all feel worried, tense or fearful sometimes. These are normal responses to certain situations. However, these feelings can have significant effects on your child’s mental health and well-being if they impact their ability to live and enjoy their life fully.

If your child is struggling with any of their BIG feelings, let us make them child-size through our award-winning Feelings Detective Curriculum. Please get in touch and book a FREE initial consultation with https://www.sunnykidsshine.com - email [email protected].