How Adults Can Help Young People Who Are Struggling
Available with English captions and subtitles in Spanish.
When a child or teen is struggling with anxiety, it can be hard as parents or other key adults in the child’s life to know what to do. McLean’s R. Meredith Elkins, PhD, offers strategies for adults to help the young people they care for.
Find resources and more about the expert below.
Compassion and Validation
The first thing that parents and educators should remember when responding to a child who is struggling with anxiety is to respond with compassion and to validate the child’s experience.
What is validation? Validation communicates that a person’s experience is understandable and that it makes sense in a given situation, so for example, “You seem really frightened right now ... This is hard for you.”
Importantly, when we validate, we are not considering whether or not the anxiety is justified or rational in a given situation.
For example, if your child is having a panic attack before going to a party, it doesn’t matter if you say, “There is nothing for you to be anxious about here,” “There is absolutely nothing dangerous in this situation,” because that’s not what your child is responding to.
And for any of us, if we get told you’re being silly, just calm down, just relax—how effective is that? If anything, it makes us more upset. When your child is anxious, they are perceiving that something in their environment is dangerous to their life or well-being, and their fight or flight response kicks in and that’s what they’re responding to.
For any of us, adults included, when we’re having big emotions, it’s hard for us to think logically and respond rationally in the moment. If you and your child both want to go to that party, you want them to go to that party, we need to get them to a place of calm before they’ll even consider going in the door.
Connecting with validation is going to be much more impactful than trying to rationalize with them in a difficult situation when emotions are high. If you’re looking to validate, there are a couple of phrases you can use around any given emotion: “You seem, (emotion),” “It makes sense that you would feel, (emotion),” “I wonder if you are, (emotion).”
“In our clinic,” says Elkins, “We always encourage parents to connect before you redirect, which really just means communicate using validation first to help the child reregulate before you jump to problem-solving around the issue.”
Once you’ve validated, it’s important to express confidence in your child’s ability to manage their anxiety.
In the party example, that might look like, “It makes sense that you feel really scared to go to this party because it’s important for you to make friends. And I know that you can handle this tough situation.”
Model Effective Coping
Parents and educators can look for opportunities to model effective coping for kids. Share with them times when you felt anxious, scared, or distressed and how you dealt with it.
For example, “I was really nervous about going into work today because I had this meeting with my boss. I felt nauseous and I just wanted to call out sick, but I knew the meeting was important, and so I went.”
“And you know what? Even though it was kind of awkward, it actually went better than I anticipated and I’m glad I did the hard thing.”
Modeling effective coping lets kids know that they’re not alone. It also helps them to understand that bravery doesn’t mean there’s no fear.
Bravery is doing the hard thing despite the fear and despite the anxiety.
When you show kids that this is how you deal with things, that helps them know they can do hard things too.
Reducing Parental Accommodation
Parental responses to child anxiety can be very powerful.
So powerful in fact, that there are treatments for child anxiety where the therapist doesn’t even meet with the child. Working only with the parents and working to change parent behavior in response to child anxiety, we can see reductions in child anxiety.
This happens by reducing parental accommodation. Parental accommodation refers to the changes that we make as parents to our own behavior in response to our child’s distress around anxiety or obsessive compulsive disorder.
This can play out in many different ways. This can look like taking your kid to and from school, if they’re scared to take the bus. This can look like never going on a date with your partner because your kid doesn’t want to have a babysitter.
Or maybe it’s basically writing your kid’s English essay for them because they feel too overwhelmed by the task or even contacting their teacher to get them out of the assignment.
Let’s be clear, we all accommodate our loved ones. We all do things as parents to reduce our child’s distress. These are not bad behaviors, and doing them does not make you a bad parent.
We do these behaviors because we love our kids and also because we feel distressed when our kids are distressed. In the absence of child anxiety or OCD, these behaviors are often no big deal.
But it’s important for parents to understand that if anxiety is a player, these accommodation behaviors can have consequences because while they reduce child anxiety in the short term, over time they can actually maintain or even increase child anxiety.
Let’s take the example of taking your kid to and from school because they’re afraid of the bus.
Through this accommodation, you’ve found an effective way for your kid to avoid all distress. They don’t need to be scared to go on the bus because they don’t even have the opportunity to go on the bus.
That’s actually the problem. In the absence of having to take the bus, your child doesn’t have the chance to learn that they can actually handle it. They don’t have the chance to learn that it gets easier over time or that they might even enjoy it.
The other reason that accommodation can be problematic is because if you are driving your kid to and from school, you’re sending your child a message that their anxiety is right, that there is something dangerous about the bus, and/or that they can’t handle the bus. So, they need the special treatment because they are too delicate to be able to handle the scary bus situation.
Over time, accommodation prevents our kids from building the bravery muscles that they need to do hard things.
Parents can work to reduce accommodation slowly and in partnership with their child. Do not just rip the rug out from underneath your child after watching this video and stop responding to their distress and their anxiety.
That is unlikely to be successful and it can lead your child to be less trusting of you and increase anxiety. Start by noticing: how do you feel and what do you do in response to your child’s anxiety?
Then ask yourself: “Is this behavior helping my child to meet their goals in the long term? Or is it helping them to become more and more avoidant, and therefore, more and more anxious in the long term?”
Point out to your child situations where you notice that your response is helping them in the short term, but in the long term isn’t helping them get any closer to their goals. In our school bus example, start by talking with your child about the ways that helping them avoid the bus might be good for them in the short term, but is problematic in the long term.
Come up with a plan together. Help them to figure out: Can they start by taking the bus home by themself? Maybe identify a friend ahead of time who they know that they can sit with.
Practice some coping strategies that they can use, like deep breathing. Maybe even identify a small reward that they can work for, like getting to pick dessert or something that night, and then work up to them taking the bus to and from school.
Key Takeaways
When caregivers commit to changing the way that they respond to their child’s anxiety, kids have even more of an opportunity to thrive.
And importantly, even the most motivated kid in treatment is going to have a hard time meeting their goals if the adults in their world aren’t also doing the hard work to change their own behavior in response to child anxiety.
Becoming involved in child treatment is beneficial both to the child and to the parent, and it really gives the family the confidence to manage anxiety symptoms and improve overall well-being.
Want More Information?
Looking for even more information about anxiety in kids and teens? You may find these resources helpful.
- Video: Anxiety in Kids and Teens – What To Watch For
- Understanding Anxiety in Kids and Teens
- Video: DBT Skills – The Value of Validation
- Video: Anxiety and OCD in the Classroom – Parents, Schools, and Health Care Professionals
- Everything You Need To Know About Child & Teen Mental Health
- Video: Anxiety in Kids – Is It Fear? Anxiety? Or a Phobia?
- Video: Anxiety and OCD in Kids and Teens 101
- School Refusal: A Complete Guide
- Video: Promoting Positive Mental Health in K-12 Students
- Video: Parents – How To Help Your Child if They Are Being Bullied
- Find all of McLean’s resources on anxiety and youth mental health
About Dr. Elkins
R. Meredith Elkins, PhD, is a program director at the McLean Anxiety Mastery Program (MAMP), an intensive group-based outpatient program for children and adolescents with anxiety disorders and OCD. She is a clinical psychologist specializing in the cognitive behavioral treatment of anxiety, mood, and related disorders in children, adolescents, and young adults.
Dr. Elkins is experienced in providing evidence-based interventions through individual, group, family, and behavioral parent training formats. She has established integrated lines of research encompassing the development, identification, and treatment of anxiety disorders in childhood.