Over the last few years, kids have had more practice coping with change, uncertainty, and fear than we ever would have imagined. With all the different ways that the world can be a frightening place – whether fire, flood, or pandemic – it’s not surprising that anxiety is still the most common type of emotional difficulty that our children struggle with. The most recent national study is showing its age but the mental health of children and adolescents report from 2015 told us that 7% of Australian children had an anxiety disorder. Based on the ever-growing waitlists for child psychologists across the country, we can safely guess that this percentage has gone up.
Psychologists have a wide range of strategies that can help children with anxiety, usually by teaching a child to spot and challenge unhelpful patterns of thinking and to face their fears gradually. These cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT) approaches were originally developed for adults but have been adapted for kids, often with great success. However, they don’t work for all kids (especially those that can’t or won’t engage in sessions) and many families notice that their child’s anxiety often returns after treatment.
Anxiety is a normal response to feeling unsafe although it can become a problem when we get stuck feeling anxious when there is no danger around. For adults, who are big and strong enough to take care of themselves, our brains will naturally protect us by gearing up for a fight or getting ready to escape. When our children feel scared or unsafe, they have a different instinct – to turn towards their caregivers for comfort, reassurance, and safety. And, as loving parents, we have a powerful instinct to give our children this comfort and safety.
The way we respond to these instincts is important, and sometimes we do this in ways which keep our child’s anxiety alive and help it grow stronger – we call these accommodations. These are all the things that parents do differently because of their child’s anxiety. As we tell our young clients, anxiety is bossy. It’s meant to be – this is our brain trying to keep us safe from danger. It has to be loud. It has to get our attention and make us listen. But anxiety can be very good at bossing around families too.
In any family with an anxious child, there will be accommodations (the research says it’s about 97% of families). We often don’t notice them because they start as tiny changes which we hope will make things easier for our kids. Whenever we have helped parents take a few steps back and look for all the ways their family has changed to work around the anxiety, they are amazed at how quickly the list grows. For example, if your child has separation worries, you might have started letting them know whenever you’re going to a different part of the house or ducking outside to check the mail. If your child worries that their headache is actually a serious brain tumour (and Dr Google agrees…) then you might have booked multiple GP appointments that help for a few days before the anxiety slowly creeps back.
What’s so bad about that? Aren’t I being a caring parent?
One of the things that makes parenting so hard is that we actually have lots of different jobs as parents which we’re trying to juggle at the same time. This doesn’t mean the daily juggle of getting dinner ready, sorting out school uniforms, and checking homework. It means juggling different parenting goals – is it more important to set a boundary right now, to teach them something, to protect them, or to allow them to build their independence? In any given moment, it can be incredibly hard to answer the question of: “what’s the most important thing my child needs from me now?”
This is even harder when our kids come to us when they are scared, because this triggers our own anxiety or stirs up our protective instincts. In these moments, we have to choose between two of our most important jobs. We can either scoop them up and make all the uncomfortable feelings disappear in this moment. Or, we can help them realise how brave they are so that they learn how to handle the uncomfortable feelings in all of the future moments.
Unfortunately, each time we accommodate our children’s anxiety, we send them a message that they should avoid the things they are anxious about because they won’t be able to cope with it. By protecting our kids, we also take away opportunities for our kids (and for us) to realise just how capable and brave they are. And because the anxiety only goes away briefly, we have to keep accommodating (often in bigger and more demanding ways). Sometimes, by the time a family has reached out for support the anxiety has completely taken over.
What can I do instead?
A team of researchers at the Yale Child Study Center, led by Dr Eli Lebowitz, created a new approach to treating child anxiety. This approach is called SPACE – Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions. It focuses on helping parents learn the best way ways to empower their children to overcome anxiety and make lasting changes for families. In SPACE, we accept that scared children will do what they are meant to do – reach out to their parents for comfort. The thing we try to change is what parents do next.
In his research, Dr Lebowitz took two groups of anxious kids. The first group of kids did a block of regular CBT sessions for anxiety. The second group of kids did nothing. Instead, their parents were taught two important things: (1) how to stop accommodating their child’s anxiety and (2) how to send a powerful message of confidence in their child’s ability to cope with anxiety. Not surprisingly, the first group were less anxious at the end. But, the second group of children showed the same improvement without ever attending a session! Whenever we have worked with families through this process, they have described the same changes. As a child’s anxiety goes down, their confidence goes up. Parents naturally stop accommodating, which gives their child lots of opportunities to practice being brave.
Why is this so powerful?
SPACE starts by acknowledging that our children are meant to turn to us when the world is feeling a bit overwhelming or scary. And because they look to us to learn about the world, how we respond matters. Our belief in their braveness matters. Our kids won’t believe they can do this unless we believe it first. Families can get stuck in a cycle of accommodation where kids find their world shrinking, and parents need to protect their children even more. SPACE helps families kick this cycle into reverse – when kids know that we can see their courage and strength, they show it to us and we spend less time stepping in to rescue them. Bravery is a muscle – the more our kids use it, the stronger it gets.
Is it hard?
SPACE asks families to change ways of coping that they have all learnt together, sometimes over years and years. Some children find it difficult but this is true of any anxiety therapy. With SPACE, the result is a family that can get back to focusing on what matters rather than focusing on anxiety. And if you have small children you’ll already know that the best way to overcome a challenge (whether anxiety, long wavy grass or thick oozy mud) is to go through it.
Coming soon!
Some of our Kindred team were part of the first group of Australian psychologists to complete the SPACE training and have seen how much it can help families. We’re incredibly excited to be working on a parenting group based on the SPACE program which we’ll run at the beginning of 2023. If you think it might help your family and would like more information, please get in touch.
More information about helping anxious kids
Below is some more information about helping anxious kids.
Dr Lebowitz also published a brilliant book written specifically for parents – Breaking Free of Child Anxiety and OCD: A Scientifically Proven Program for Parents – about SPACE.
Anxiety in children (beyondblue.org.au)
Anxiety in children and childhood fears | Raising Children Network
