Courage is doing what you’re afraid to do. There can be no courage unless you’re scared.
Edward Vernon Rickenbacker, an American fighter pilot in World War I
Some children are more anxious than others. For them, dangers seem to be everywhere: a new brother or sister, going to a new school, a change of routines, separation anxiety.
Consider that our children fear doing something. Which of the following answers do we usually say? (some answers are picked from Lawrence Cohen’s book The Opposite of Worry)
- I’ll give you a whole bag of candy.
- Stop being a baby.
- Don’t be ridiculous.
- I don’t want to hear another word from you about this.
- There is no reason to be scared.
- You don’t have to go.
- Just grit your teeth. It will be over before you know it.
- I can feel you trembling. I know it’s scary. I’ll hold you for as long as you like, and when you’re ready, we’ll go together.
The first answer avoids understanding the anxiety through bribing. It might work a few times, but what happens when a bag of candy will inevitably be insufficient? Two bags? What if children learn to expect rewards and bribes for other things and activities that don’t make them feel anxious?
Answers 2, 3, and 4 send a dismissive message to children who might start to think: ‘I can’t relax because I can’t trust my caregiver to understand me’. Wouldn’t our children want to become unafraid of, let’s say, big, bad ladybugs? How would I react if I were to share a worry with my husband, sister, or friends, and they would lovingly reply, ‘tough luck, buttercup’, and end the conversation? I would suppress my reactions and learn to keep quiet about other thoughts, knowing which reply I would get. After we reply to our children in such ways, it might seem that our children have conquered their fears. They have learned how to suppress their behaviours in front of us. Who knows how they react when they are on their own? Not us.
People have said, ‘Don’t cry to other people for years and years, and all it has ever meant is ‘I’m too uncomfortable when you show your feelings: Don’t cry.’ I’d rather have them say, ‘Go ahead and cry. I’m here to be with you.’
Fred Rogers, also known as Mister Rogers
Why might answer 5, ‘There is no reason to be scared’, not work as intended?
Some of the children’s fears appear to be irrational to us, adults: monsters under the bed, lamps that cast dragon shadows, insects (spiders are not insects), hand dryers (loud noises), etc. But for children, these fears are valid and genuine.
How often have you told children that their fears aren’t worth worrying about? I urge parents to give up deciding whether their children’s fears are legitimate. All fears are valid because they are the feelings that our children are experiencing. Yet it’s hard to give up our habit of judgment: This fear is reasonable, that one is not.
Lawrence Cohen – The Opposite of Worry
Answer 6, ‘You don’t have to go’, looks well-intentioned, as we avoid doing a specific thing because it makes our children anxious. In the short term, this option might work for the entire family (children feel protected, parents think they did the right thing), but in the long run, anxiety might be reinforced. However, there are instances where we need to listen and trust our children, even if they might not offer specifics.
Consider the case where a child doesn’t feel comfortable going anymore to private lessons without providing too many details. Perhaps they don’t like the activity (children might need more time adjusting to it – my daughter wasn’t a big fan of her tennis lessons after six months of practice, and now, a year later, she jumped up and down to sign her up for tennis. ‘You don’t have to go’ at six months of practice would have robbed her of this joy at one year of training).
The teacher might say hurtful things, and ‘You don’t have to go’ could become ‘You don’t have to go to this teacher. Let’s find a new one.’ In extreme but quite real situations, the teacher might be a wolf disguised as sheep, predating children who might become too afraid to talk in more detail with us. In this case, ‘You don’t have to go’ is a lifesaver.
As it is with life and children, everything is context-dependent. Sometimes, children might need a gentle push to do something about their anxiety, and sometimes, we need to trust them and follow their lead, with no words from their side.
Answer 7, ‘Just grit your teeth. It will be over before you know it.’ wears suppression tones (suppression means containing the behavioural manifestations of our emotions by hiding them) and is another heavy context-dependent answer. Sometimes, we need a reminder that things don’t always go our way and complaining about it would take longer than actually doing that activity. We might still experiment with the severe effects of uncomfortable emotions, as we are focusing on ignoring them.
Answer 8, ‘I can feel you trembling. I know it’s scary. I’ll hold you for as long as you like, and when you’re ready, we’ll go together.’ is also the answer Cohen recommends.
The solution is to face the problem, to let the child feel the fear, but not to panic.
Lawrence Cohen – The Opposite of Worry
We reassuringly validate the children’s emotions and encourage them to face them. We don’t want to teach our children to hide, ignore, deny, or lie about their worries, but show them how to manage such heavy emotions healthily.
Parenting is a case of the more you know, the less you know. Something that works for some children or parents will be unsuitable for others. And so, perhaps we need to approach parenting like magpies, picking something from here and there until we make it uniquely ours and adjusted to our children and us.
Sometimes, ‘You don’t have to go’ is perfectly valid. Sometimes, a bribe could work. And sometimes, we use suppression. We are all flawed and inconsistent and trying to do our best.
What is valid for all parents is that we can’t afford to make empty promises to children that nothing bad will ever happen to them. A healthy dose of anxiety is desirable because it is a clue that tells us to avoid danger, take action, or perform at our peak. And for the unhealthy doses of anxiety, we can help our children face their emotions and become more self-reliant over time. One of the most important gifts we can give our children is their confidence in what it takes to rebuild themselves and bounce back from setbacks.
A child needs for a parent to be a container for their emotions by accepting them, not being overwhelmed by them.
When we feel bad, we don’t need to be fixed. We want to be felt with rather than dealt with. We want someone else to understand how we feel so we don’t need to feel lonely with that feeling.
Philippa Perry – The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read
We can ask questions if our children are willing to discuss their worries. Instead of leading questions (‘Are you worried about the upcoming test?’), we can ask open-ended questions (‘How do you feel about the upcoming test?’).
Other examples of open-ended questions:
- What did you try?
- How did that work?
- So, what could you try next?
- Why?
To our children’s answers, we must listen to them carefully and respectfully, with no hint of dismissal or ignoring. Otherwise, they would feel wounded by our reactions and remember not to come to us the next time. We must look at our past relationships where we were made feel small or invisible. Our wounds might still be raw or healing/healed. It is the same with our children. Our tone, choice of words, body language, everything we use can become surgical knives: we can mend our children’s wounds or make them worse.
Some examples of respectful phrases:
- I can understand why you see this as complicated.
- Wow, you must be feeling really anxious.
- It must be so hard to feel like this.
But we must pay attention to how we say some things: ‘That’s fine. I was never very good at this topic either’, as in this case, we are tempting our children to follow our lead.
This act of making our children feel seen or heard might work wonders. Even now, when I sometimes vent to my husband or friends, all I want to hear is, ‘I understand you’. Of course, as an adult, I know that the best kind of validation is my internal reflection, not the external one. And yet, it feels good to be held in the compassionate and silent arms of others.
I guess I want to be treated older when I feel privileged, and I want to be treated younger when I feel scared.
A girl’s quote from Ron Taffel and Melinda Blau’s book – Parenting by heart
Other strategies that could work but should be adapted to the child’s age are playful interventions or make-believe.
– Branch, how dare you to hit my daughter! I am so cross with you right now! I will never, ever speak to you again if you don’t apologize to my daughter!
Then I would pretend in a different voice to be the branch and say something like: ‘Never! I like hitting small kids!’ And the pretend dialogue would continue back and forth until the “branch” would apologise, and my daughter would be laughing and ready to start again.
Another time, I would play make-believe with a doll and have a dialogue with it. The doll would say she didn’t want to try X because she was afraid. And I would encourage the doll while my daughter would sit quietly and watch this conversation.
Or I pretended to be the one afraid of trying Y, and my daughter pretended to be my mother, who encouraged me to make an attempt.
Initially, I was quite reticent to play these games, as I didn’t know what to do or say, and it felt unnatural to repeat quotes from parenting books. But once I saw how well they work in my daughter’s case, there was no looking back. If I need to scold the table’s corner because it happened to be in my daughter’s way, so be it. It is a harsh world out there. Of course, such strategies are highly dependent on the children’s age. Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, Bluey and another book from Lawrence Cohen, Playful Parenting, are invaluable resources for make-believe or pretend play.
Cohen noticed an interesting phenomenon as a child needing a science project for school. His mother was a nursery school teacher, and the children hatched chickens every spring. On weekends and evenings, Cohen had to take care of the baby chicks. Spending a lot of time with them, he noticed that if he took a baby chick, held it still with his hand on the table and looked at it menacingly from above like a hawk, the chick would play dead for a minute as a defence mechanism. For the next experiment, he did the same thing, frightening two chicks at once, and both chicks played dead for much longer (about five minutes). But, if Cohen only scared a chick and let the other one wander in the chicks’ box, the immobilised chick would only play dead for a few seconds and then spring back alive. Cohen’s conclusion: a frightened chick looks to the second chick to see if it is safe.
Our chicks might also pick cues from our behaviours and act nervous if we are anxious. But if we show our children that we can handle tense situations calmly, we might become the second chick for them.
A wonderful anecdote to share with our children is the following.
This is the story of the magician Harry Houdini who travelled through Europe to small towns challenging local jailers to bind him in a straight jacket and lock him in a cell to see if he could escape. Over and over again, he would amaze and astonish his audiences with how he could break out of his straight jacket and cell.
But one day, he went to a small Irish village and ran into trouble because in front of a whole flock of people, he broke free of the straight jacket, but no matter what he did, he could not open the lock. Finally disappointed, the townspeople left. Houdini asked the jailer about the lock trying to understand why he couldn’t open it. The jailer told him, ‘it was just an ordinary lock, I figured you could open anything, so I didn’t bother locking it’.
We assume we have problems to solve, but the cell door might already be open. Or, as Cohen said, ‘Don’t believe everything you believe’, as we recognize that our anxiety thoughts might be nothing more than guesses and not facts.
Notes:
I wrote this article with the image of a securely attached child that feels loved by their caregivers. However, there will be times when loving caregivers need specialized help by reaching out to general practitioners for referrals, counselling, anxiety medicines, etc. Please consult your general practitioner for more details.
HSE (The Irish Health Service Executive) Guide for Anxiety
NHS (The English National Health Service) Guide for Anxiety
Sarah Naish’s book The A-Z of Therapeutic Parenting is eye-opening and full of insights and coping strategies for children that suffered unspeakable abuse. One of the images that will forever haunt me is how some abused children describe wetting themselves or the bed: ‘feeling a warm hug.’ Specialized help for dealing with anxieties is mandatory for caregivers of traumatised children.
Related articles:
Cognitive Reappraisal or How to Cope with Unpleasant Feelings through Reframing, where I talk in more detail about emotional suppression.
Relevant quote – we can modify any of the three characteristics of an emotion (physiological reactions, behavioural expressions or beliefs) to make them more bearable. Changing our beliefs or perceptions about a problematic situation [psychologists call this cognitive technique cognitive reappraisal because we reframe or reinterpret our appraisal of our subjective interpretations of stimuli and experiences] has the highest chance of changing the emotional impact of that situation.
Interoception, the Sense that Builds the Mind which focuses on the links between well-being (which includes anxiety management) and interoception (our capacity to interpret the body’s internal signals correctly).
RAIN: How to Recognize, Allow, Investigate, and Nurture Emotions
Relevant quote – Donald J. Robertson, cognitive psychotherapist and author of several books that describe the relationship between modern psychotherapy (CBT) and classical Greek and Roman philosophy. He writes that ‘anxious feelings abate naturally if we let them’, and this is ‘arguably, the most robustly established finding in the entire field of psychotherapy research. It’s also something that ancient authors, including the Stoics, seem to have realized. Strong feelings, particularly anxious ones, tend to naturally fade over time, under the right conditions. Psychologists call this “emotional habituation”, and it happens even in simple organisms. It’s so basic that it’s almost more like a physiological process than a psychological one.’