by Natasha Daniels

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5 Ways Caring Parents Make Teen Anxiety Worse

5 Ways Caring Parents Make Teen Anxiety Worse

Your happy-go-lucky child has turned into an anxiety-ridden teen. It is a painful thing to watch. Activities that were once enjoyable are now avoided. Going to school is a daily miracle. Instead of driving to the mall, you are driving to the doctor with mysterious stomach issues.

Teen anxiety is not only debilitating for your teen, it is debilitating for the whole family.

So how do you make this nightmare go away? How do parents help with teen anxiety?

You can start off learning what not to do – and then go from there. Teen anxiety can look very similar among teens, but how parents deal with teen anxiety can look vastly different depending on the family’s parenting style.

Here are 5 common mistakes I see good parents making in my therapy practice:

  1. Accommodating their teen’s anxiety.

    Parents feel bad. They don’t want their kids to have teen anxiety. They want to make it all go away. And so they do just that.

    Their kids don’t want to go to school. They switch them to online schooling.

    Their kids don’t want to sleep alone. They give them a permanent spot in their bed. 

    Their kids are afraid to do new things. They never push them out of their comfort zone.

    Helping kids with teen anxiety is a balancing act. You don’t want to push your teens too hard, but you don’t want to not encourage them at all.

    Help your teen develop coping mechanisms and then encourage them to slowly fight back!

  2. Forcing Teens to Face Their Fears Too Soon

    The flip side of the issue above – are parents who are too overzealous when addressing teen anxiety. They hate to see their teens suffer, so they force them to face their fears.

    The intention is good, but the delivery is bad.

    These parents do not understand anxiety. They believe they can strong arm their teens to face their fears and that will “get them over it.”

    Unfortunately teen anxiety doesn’t work that way. Forcing teens to do things that they are not ready to do can backfire. Like I said before, handling teen anxiety is a balancing act.

    Accommodating their fears is not helpful, but too much pushing can have a similar effect. They can both stop any progress from occurring.

    Give your teen coping mechanisms and then let them face small challenges. Small challenges add up to big results.

  3. Putting too much pressure on fixing anxiety.

    Some parents get anxiety. They get it so much that they are ready to beat teen anxiety for their kids. They are the ones reading the books. They are the ones participating in therapy. They are the ones hand holding their kids through the battle of teen anxiety.

    I get it. It is frustrating to see your teen move at a slower pace than you would like. It is frustrating to understand the skills that they need to use, only to watch them not use them.

    Unfortunately this is a battle you cannot fight for them. When you fight teen anxiety harder than your teens you do two things. You make them hide their anxiety – which is the opposite of what you want to do. And second, you make them feel overwhelmed. When this happens, many teens just give up.

    This is your teen’s battle, not yours. Be a supportive passenger. You are not the driver.

  4. Believing their teen is manipulating them.

    I meet many parents who completely believe their teens are using anxiety as an excuse. I hear things like, “He is just lazy and doesn’t want to go to school” and “She is not scared at night, she just likes sleeping with us.”

    Most teens are embarrassed to have teen anxiety and would do anything to NOT have this problem.

    When you view your teen’s anxiety as manipulation you are going to parent it with discipline and annoyance – both of which will exacerbate the issue.

  5. Having misperceptions of anxiety.

    I often hear parents say things like, “I don’t understand why she is afraid of that – nothing bad has ever happened to her?” Parents rack their brains with questions like “Is he being bullied?” And “Did she go through a trauma we don’t know about?” Usually, the answer is – no.

    Anxiety has a strong genetic component and runs in families. Children are born with the predisposition to be anxious. That doesn’t mean they cannot learn skills to beat their anxiety, it just means you should stop trying to answer the question “But why?”

    Teen anxiety is often irrational and is not usually based on actual experiences.

So now that you know what not to do – what should you do? Arm your teen with coping mechanisms. Take them to a therapist that can help them build these skills. Have them read a teen self-help book that will teach them skills or watch a parenting video to learn how to teach those skills yourself. Whatever you do, give your teen support.

Help your teen with these three steps:

1. Identify anxiety themes and triggers
2. Teach them coping mechanisms to face their anxiety
3. Set up bite-size challenges to help them face their fears
4. Repeat

(This post first appeared on AnxiousToddlers.com and has been reprinted here with full permission.)

About the Author: Natasha Daniels

Natasha Daniels is a child therapist and author of Anxiety Sucks! A Teen Survival Guide and How to Parent Your Anxious Toddler. She is the creator of AnxiousToddlers.com and has a Psychcentral blog Parenting Anxious Kids. Her work has been featured on various sites including Huffington Post, Scary Mommy and The Mighty. She can be found on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest or making parenting videos for Curious.com.

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Feeling seen, safe, and cared for is a biological need. It’s not a choice and it’s not pandering. It’s a biological need.

Children - all of us - will prioritise relational safety over everything.

When children feel seen, safe, and a sense of belonging they will spend less resources in fight, flight, or withdrawal, and will be free to divert those resources into learning, making thoughtful choices, engaging in ways that can grow them.

They will also be more likely to spend resources seeking out those people (their trusted adults at school) or places (school) that make them feel good about themselves, rather than avoiding the people of spaces that make them feel rubbish or inadequate.

Behaviour support and learning support is about felt safety support first.

The schools and educators who know this and practice it are making a profound difference, not just for young people but for all of us. They are actively engaging in crime prevention, mental illness prevention, and nurturing strong, beautiful little people into strong, beautiful big ones.♥️

View Instagram post by karenyoung_heysigmund

Aug 19

Open post by karenyoung_heysigmund with ID 17976303911870995
Feeling seen, safe, and cared for is a biological need. It’s not a choice and it’s not pandering. It’s a biological need. Children - all of us - will prioritise relational safety over everything. When children feel seen, safe, and a sense of belonging they will spend less resources in fight, flight, or withdrawal, and will be free to divert those resources into learning, making thoughtful choices, engaging in ways that can grow them. They will also be more likely to spend resources seeking out those people (their trusted adults at school) or places (school) that make them feel good about themselves, rather than avoiding the people of spaces that make them feel rubbish or inadequate. Behaviour support and learning support is about felt safety support first. The schools and educators who know this and practice it are making a profound difference, not just for young people but for all of us. They are actively engaging in crime prevention, mental illness prevention, and nurturing strong, beautiful little people into strong, beautiful big ones.♥️

karenyoung_heysigmund

Emotion is e-motion. Energy in motion.

When emotions happen, we have two options: express or depress. That’s it. They’re the options.

When your young person (or you) is being swamped by big feelings, let the feelings come.

Hold the boundary around behaviour - keep them physically safe and let them feel their relationship with you is safe, but you don’t need to fix their feelings.

They aren’t a sign of breakage. They’re a sign your child is catalysing the energy. Our job over the next many years is to help them do this respectfully.

When emotional energy is shut down, it doesn’t disappear. It gets held in the body and will come out sideways in response to seemingly benign things, or it will drive distraction behaviours (such as addiction, numbness).

Sometimes there’ll be a need for them to control that energy so they can do what they need to do - go to school, take the sports field, do the exam - but the more we can make way for expression either in the moment or later, the safer and softer they’ll feel in their minds and bodies.

Expression is the most important part of moving through any feeling. This might look like talking, moving, crying, writing, yelling.

This is why you might see big feelings after school. It’s often a sign that they’ve been controlling themselves all day - through the feelings that come with learning new things, being quiet and still, trying to get along with everyone, not having the power and influence they need (that we all need). When they get into the car at pickup, finally those feelings they’ve been holding on to have a safe place to show up and move through them and out of them.

It can be so messy! It takes time to learn how to lasso feelings and words into something unmessy.

In the meantime, our job is to hold a tender, strong, safe place for that emotional energy to move out of them.

Hold the boundary around behaviour where you can, add warmth where you can, and when they are calm talk about what happened and how they might do things differently next time. And be patient. Just because someone tells us how to swing a racket, doesn’t mean we’ll win Wimbledon tomorrow. Good things take time, and loads of practice.♥️

View Instagram post by karenyoung_heysigmund

Aug 10

Open post by karenyoung_heysigmund with ID 18081959395923958
Emotion is e-motion. Energy in motion. When emotions happen, we have two options: express or depress. That’s it. They’re the options. When your young person (or you) is being swamped by big feelings, let the feelings come. Hold the boundary around behaviour - keep them physically safe and let them feel their relationship with you is safe, but you don’t need to fix their feelings. They aren’t a sign of breakage. They’re a sign your child is catalysing the energy. Our job over the next many years is to help them do this respectfully. When emotional energy is shut down, it doesn’t disappear. It gets held in the body and will come out sideways in response to seemingly benign things, or it will drive distraction behaviours (such as addiction, numbness). Sometimes there’ll be a need for them to control that energy so they can do what they need to do - go to school, take the sports field, do the exam - but the more we can make way for expression either in the moment or later, the safer and softer they’ll feel in their minds and bodies. Expression is the most important part of moving through any feeling. This might look like talking, moving, crying, writing, yelling. This is why you might see big feelings after school. It’s often a sign that they’ve been controlling themselves all day - through the feelings that come with learning new things, being quiet and still, trying to get along with everyone, not having the power and influence they need (that we all need). When they get into the car at pickup, finally those feelings they’ve been holding on to have a safe place to show up and move through them and out of them. It can be so messy! It takes time to learn how to lasso feelings and words into something unmessy. In the meantime, our job is to hold a tender, strong, safe place for that emotional energy to move out of them. Hold the boundary around behaviour where you can, add warmth where you can, and when they are calm talk about what happened and how they might do things differently next time. And be patient. Just because someone tells us how to swing a racket, doesn’t mean we’ll win Wimbledon tomorrow. Good things take time, and loads of practice.♥️

karenyoung_heysigmund

Thank you Adelaide! Thank you for your stories, your warmth, for laughing with me, spaghetti bodying with me (when you know, you know), for letting me scribble on your books, and most of all, for letting me be a part of your world today.

So proud to share the stage with Steve Biddulph, @matt.runnalls ,
@michellemitchell.author, and @nathandubsywant. To @sharonwittauthor - thank you for creating this beautiful, brave space for families to come together and grow stronger.

And to the parents, carers, grandparents - you are extraordinary and it’s a privilege to share the space with you.

Parenting is big work. Tender, gritty, beautiful, hard. It asks everything of us - our strength, our softness, our growth. We’re raising beautiful little people into beautiful big people, and at the same time, we’re growing ourselves.

Sometimes that growth feels impatient and demanding - like we’re being wrenched forward before we’re ready, before our feet have found the ground.

But that’s the nature of growth isn’t it. It rarely waits for permission. It asks only that we keep moving.

And that’s okay.

There’s no rush. You have time. We have time.

In the meantime they will keep growing us, these little humans of ours. Quietly, daily, deeply. They will grow us in the most profound ways if we let them. And we must let them - for their sake, for our own, and for the ancestral threads that tie us to the generations that came before us, and those that will come because of us. We will grow for them and because of them.♥️

View Instagram post by karenyoung_heysigmund

Aug 2

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Thank you Adelaide! Thank you for your stories, your warmth, for laughing with me, spaghetti bodying with me (when you know, you know), for letting me scribble on your books, and most of all, for letting me be a part of your world today. So proud to share the stage with Steve Biddulph, @matt.runnalls , @michellemitchell.author, and @nathandubsywant. To @sharonwittauthor - thank you for creating this beautiful, brave space for families to come together and grow stronger. And to the parents, carers, grandparents - you are extraordinary and it’s a privilege to share the space with you. Parenting is big work. Tender, gritty, beautiful, hard. It asks everything of us - our strength, our softness, our growth. We’re raising beautiful little people into beautiful big people, and at the same time, we’re growing ourselves. Sometimes that growth feels impatient and demanding - like we’re being wrenched forward before we’re ready, before our feet have found the ground. But that’s the nature of growth isn’t it. It rarely waits for permission. It asks only that we keep moving. And that’s okay. There’s no rush. You have time. We have time. In the meantime they will keep growing us, these little humans of ours. Quietly, daily, deeply. They will grow us in the most profound ways if we let them. And we must let them - for their sake, for our own, and for the ancestral threads that tie us to the generations that came before us, and those that will come because of us. We will grow for them and because of them.♥️

karenyoung_heysigmund

Their words might be messy, angry, sad. They might sound bigger than the issue, or as though they aren’t about the issue at all.

The words are the warning lights on the dashboard. They’re the signal that something is wrong, but they won’t always tell us exactly what that ‘something’ is. Responding only to the words is like noticing the light without noticing the problem.

Our job isn’t to respond to their words, but to respond to the feelings and the need behind the words.

First though, we need to understand what the words are signalling. This won’t always be obvious and it certainly won’t always be easy.

At first the signal might be blurry, or too bright, or too loud, or not obvious.

Unless we really understand the problem behind signal - the why behind words - we might inadvertently respond to what we think the problem is, not what the problem actually is.

Words can be hard and messy, and when they are fuelled by big feelings that can jet from us with full force. It is this way for all of us.

Talking helps catalyse the emotion, and (eventually) bring the problem into a clearer view.

But someone needs to listen to the talking. You won’t always be able to do this - you’re human too - but when you can, it will be one of the most powerful ways to love them through their storms.

If the words are disrespectful, try:

‘I want to hear you but I love you too much to let you think it’s okay to speak like that. Do you want to try it a different way?’

Expectations, with support. Leadership, with warmth. Then, let them talk.

Our job isn’t to fix them - they aren’t broken. Our job is to understand them so we can help them feel seen, safe, and supported through the big of it all. When we do this, we give them what they need to find their way through.♥️

View Instagram post by karenyoung_heysigmund

Jul 21

Open post by karenyoung_heysigmund with ID 17913738897080523
Their words might be messy, angry, sad. They might sound bigger than the issue, or as though they aren’t about the issue at all. The words are the warning lights on the dashboard. They’re the signal that something is wrong, but they won’t always tell us exactly what that ‘something’ is. Responding only to the words is like noticing the light without noticing the problem. Our job isn’t to respond to their words, but to respond to the feelings and the need behind the words. First though, we need to understand what the words are signalling. This won’t always be obvious and it certainly won’t always be easy. At first the signal might be blurry, or too bright, or too loud, or not obvious. Unless we really understand the problem behind signal - the why behind words - we might inadvertently respond to what we think the problem is, not what the problem actually is. Words can be hard and messy, and when they are fuelled by big feelings that can jet from us with full force. It is this way for all of us. Talking helps catalyse the emotion, and (eventually) bring the problem into a clearer view. But someone needs to listen to the talking. You won’t always be able to do this - you’re human too - but when you can, it will be one of the most powerful ways to love them through their storms. If the words are disrespectful, try: ‘I want to hear you but I love you too much to let you think it’s okay to speak like that. Do you want to try it a different way?’ Expectations, with support. Leadership, with warmth. Then, let them talk. Our job isn’t to fix them - they aren’t broken. Our job is to understand them so we can help them feel seen, safe, and supported through the big of it all. When we do this, we give them what they need to find their way through.♥️

karenyoung_heysigmund

Perth and Adeladie - can`t wait to see you!

The Resilient Kids Conference is coming to:

- Perth on Saturday 19 July
- Adelaide on Saturday 2 August

I love this conference. I love it so much. I love the people I`m speaking with. I love the people who come to listen. I love that there is a whole day dedicated to parents, carers, and the adults who are there in big and small ways for young people.

I’ll be joining the brilliant @michellemitchell.author, Steve Biddulph, and @matt.runnalls for a full day dedicated to supporting YOU with practical tools, powerful strategies, and life-changing insights on how we can show up even more for the kids and teens in our lives.

Michelle Mitchell will leave you energised and inspired as she shares how one caring adult can change the entire trajectory of a young life.

Steve Biddulph will offer powerful, perspective-shifting wisdom on how we can support young people (and ourselves) through anxiety.

Matt Runnalls will move and inspire you as he blends research, science, and his own lived experience to help us better support and strengthen our neurodivergent young people.

And then there`s me. I’ll be talking about how we can support kids and teens (and ourselves) through big feelings, how to set and hold loving boundaries, what to do when behaviour gets big, and how to build connection and influence that really lasts, even through the tricky times.

We’ll be with you the whole day — cheering you on, sharing what works, and holding space for the important work you do.

Whether you live with kids, work with kids, or show up in any way, big and small, for a young person — this day is for you.

Parents, carers, teachers, early educators, grandparents, aunts, uncles… you’re all part of a child’s village. This event is here for you, and so are we.❤️

See here for @resilientkidsconference tickets for more info https://michellemitchell.org/resilient-kids-conference

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Jul 12

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Perth and Adeladie - can't wait to see you! The Resilient Kids Conference is coming to: - Perth on Saturday 19 July - Adelaide on Saturday 2 August I love this conference. I love it so much. I love the people I'm speaking with. I love the people who come to listen. I love that there is a whole day dedicated to parents, carers, and the adults who are there in big and small ways for young people. I’ll be joining the brilliant @michellemitchell.author, Steve Biddulph, and @matt.runnalls for a full day dedicated to supporting YOU with practical tools, powerful strategies, and life-changing insights on how we can show up even more for the kids and teens in our lives. Michelle Mitchell will leave you energised and inspired as she shares how one caring adult can change the entire trajectory of a young life. Steve Biddulph will offer powerful, perspective-shifting wisdom on how we can support young people (and ourselves) through anxiety. Matt Runnalls will move and inspire you as he blends research, science, and his own lived experience to help us better support and strengthen our neurodivergent young people. And then there's me. I’ll be talking about how we can support kids and teens (and ourselves) through big feelings, how to set and hold loving boundaries, what to do when behaviour gets big, and how to build connection and influence that really lasts, even through the tricky times. We’ll be with you the whole day — cheering you on, sharing what works, and holding space for the important work you do. Whether you live with kids, work with kids, or show up in any way, big and small, for a young person — this day is for you. Parents, carers, teachers, early educators, grandparents, aunts, uncles… you’re all part of a child’s village. This event is here for you, and so are we.❤️ See here for @resilientkidsconference tickets for more info https://michellemitchell.org/resilient-kids-conference

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