digest
Short Summary
Main recommendation: Parents of anxious children should focus less on reassuring the child and more on listening to fears, highlighting past successes, and teaching coping and problem-solving skills, while watching their own questioning behavior. Parents should seek professional help when anxiety becomes frequent, intense, triggered by ordinary situations, or interferes with school, home, or social life.
Key Points
- According to Dr. Pat Santini, the parenting piece is often more important than the direct treatment work done with children.
- Validate the child's common fears (such as not being liked, doing badly at school, getting lost) and give context that most kids have similar fears.
- Reassurance-seeking can worsen anxiety, so the goal is to teach coping and problem-solving rather than always comforting.
- Watch for red flags: daily physical complaints, intense reactions to ordinary things, reactions to everyday situations like relatives visiting or playdates, and interference with functioning.
Details Worth Noting
- Concrete instructions:
- Listen to the child and let them voice their fears.
- Give encouragement and context that these fears are common and not unusual.
- Bring up past examples of the child managing similar situations (for example, "Last year you had lunch with Sally and Billy all the time, and they're in your class this year, so why don't you ask them?").
- Avoid asking anxiety-feeding questions such as "Are you going to be okay? Do you have everything? Are you ready for your test?"
- Avoid reassuring repeatedly when the child asks things like "Is this going to be okay?" or "What if nobody's home when I get home?"
- Teach coping strategies such as breathing, mindfulness exercises, or walking through the steps the child can take to make sure nothing bad happens.
- An occasional stomachache, headache, or need for reassurance is considered okay; repeated symptoms on many days may be a concern.
- Intensity matters: a child reacting strongly to something ordinary like school, repeatedly tantrumming or crying about going, is a signal to take note of.
- Interference with school, home life, social life, or other areas is named as the biggest sign that it may be time to seek help.
- Dr. Santini notes that even she sometimes asks these anxiety-feeding questions with her own kids despite knowing better, and recommends seeking additional support if these strategies don't work.
Bottom Line
Parents can help anxious children most by changing their own responses, reducing reassurance and anxiety-feeding questions, and building coping skills, and they should seek professional support when anxiety is persistent or disrupts daily life.
