When Worry Whispers: A Parent’s Guide to Childhood Anxiety

Have you noticed your child or youth avoiding or refusing to participate in typical tasks? Have you found your child or youth worrying excessively, complaining about their stomach hurting, being restless, having their breathing pace change? A factor to consider is your child may be experiencing anxious childhood emotions. I want to reassure you that witnessing your child or youth experience anxious feelings, thoughts, or behaviours can feel overwhelming and instill uncertainty on how to best support them.

This blog identifies key components in supporting a child, youth, or adolescent with anxious childhood emotions as a parent or caregiver to help them effectively manage their anxiety and encourage autonomy and independence in future years.

I would like to take the time to reassure you that it is common for children to experience anxious childhood emotions, and supporting children through these emotions can be helpful for their growth and resilience.

Anxious Childhood Emotions

Anxiety is a human response, which is described as a stressful response to danger or threat. It is important to consider when anxious emotions are impacting one’s daily tasks and everyday life. This may be termed as persistent or severe anxious emotions. A child displaying anxious childhood emotions can be observed in numerous ways, including physical symptoms, behavioural changes, and changes in thought patterns.

1. Physical symptoms may include but are not limited to racing heart, stomach aches, butterflies in stomach, headaches, tension in body, shaking, sweating. For example, a child or youth may be at a sporting event with many people and may express their heart racing due to worry or uncomfortable feelings about being around many people. This example displays a child or youth experiencing a change in breathing due to anxious childhood emotions.
2. Behavioural changes may include but are not limited to sleep difficulties, avoiding tasks/events, emotional meltdowns, angry outbursts, change in appetite (eating less or more), difficulty concentrating, clinginess. For example, a child or youth may be scheduled to attend a band group meeting and since their best friend is unable to attend, they avoid attending the meeting due to anxious childhood emotions. This example shows a child or youth avoiding an event due to lack of comfort or reassurance with the presence of a safe figure.
3. Changes in thought patterns may include but are not limited to negative self-talk, obsessive thoughts, cognitive distortions (thinking errors that worsen a situation). For example, a child or youth may find themselves in at school preparing to complete a math test and they begin to have thoughts like, “I am going to fail this test” or “I am so dumb.” This example displays the cognitive distortion of catastrophizing, which means thinking the worst outcome possible and negative self-talk, because of worry towards a school math test.

Understanding Accommodation

When children or young people experience anxious childhood emotions, it is typical for parents, caregivers, or other figures in the child, youth, or adolescent’s world to accommodate their need or worry. I want to reassure you this comes from a place of care and nurture.

We might wonder why caregivers accommodate, and it varies from person to person and situation to situation. It is quite common for caregivers to accommodate, as it comes from a good place of having a challenging time seeing their child in distress. Some common reasons caregivers accommodate can be the following: to reduce a child’s distress, the caregiver(s) may feel the anxiety is harmful and should be avoided, the need for short-term or child family functioning, to protect the child’s social status, caregiver(s) own anxiety, or to reduce a child’s aggressive behaviour.

If you may be wondering, do I accommodate with my child? There are diverse types of accommodations. It is important for you (as a caregiver) to reflect on your behaviours, as a caregiver may alter their own behaviours to accommodate. This may be seen in one of two ways: actively taking part in behaviours related to anxiety, as well as modifying a family routine to prevent a child from experiencing distress. Accommodating behaviours may be seen as the following:

1. Speaking – For example, speaking for a child with social anxiety.
2. Providing – For example, providing a child with information about the parent’s schedules or plans.
3. Driving – For example, driving particular routes.
4. Doing – For example, doing homework for the child because of anxiety.
5. Accompanying – For example, accompanying a child to a part of the house they fear approaching alone.
6. Taking – For example, taking a child to unnecessary medical checkups or procedures.

While we sit with understanding the accommodation comes from good intention and the want to relieve your child’s distress, it can be seen as a barrier for your child to manage their distress independently. When caregivers accommodate, we may see different impacts, such as promoting avoidance, reducing ability to self-regulate, reducing a child’s confidence in themselves, reducing insight, and reducing motivation for treatment. While these are all going to alleviate distress in the moment, it inherently engages in a cycle that can be unfavourable for the child to process distress in the future.

Accommodation versus Support with Anxious Childhood Emotions

Accommodation within the world of anxious childhood emotions can be explained as changing behaviours and/or routines to help a child or youth with anxious childhood emotions or alleviate distress towards anxious childhood emotions. An article by Sigal Zilcha-Mano and colleagues (2022) identified that studies showed around 95%-100% of parents frequently accommodate to relieve their child’s symptoms. This study provides evidence that shows us accommodation is common behaviour when supporting individuals with anxious childhood emotions.

Alternatively, support can be seen as providing the child or youth with care and compassion to thrive and work through their emotional difficulty. Derived from Eli Leibowitz training, Supporting Parents through Anxious Childhood Emotions (SPACE), it leverages on increasing support while decreasing accommodation.

Support is a term many individuals hear when one may need additional encouragement or resources to succeed and move forward. When the term support is used regarding supporting anxious childhood emotions, Dr. Eli Lebowitz refers to combining acceptance and validation with confidence. The combination of these approaches is to provide explicit acknowledgement of the potential distressing emotion the child or young person is experiencing and providing messaging to the child that they can overcome the distress. When it comes to providing support, it can be helpful to acknowledge your child’s distress so they can see that you understand how uncomfortable they are, while also steering them toward coping more independently with the discomfort.

Now that you’ve enhanced your awareness around accommodation and support after reading this, I challenge you to catch any accommodations you may be observing in your own behaviour and explore how it can be changed to a supporting behaviour, such as saying supportive statements, encouraging your child to work through the distress, or setting boundaries to foster your child’s independence and resilience.

Reach Out for Help

If the points and information around anxious childhood emotions above seem like something you would like to learn more about and receive individualized support with, please do not hesitate to reach out. As mentioned briefly above, Dr. Eli Lebowitz created a treatment for caregivers named Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions (SPACE), which is aimed to treat children and adolescents with anxiety disorders solely with the work of the parent/caregiver. This is a great treatment to utilize if you may find that your child struggles with anxious emotions, and you could benefit from additional support. It can also be helpful if they are not ready to work on these challenges, and you as the caregiver(s) are ready to take it on!