How can I help my anxious child?
The new school year has just started and the children have settled back into the routine of lessons, hanging out with friends, homework and after-school activities. But for some children, September brings nothing but stress and anxiety, whether they struggle with school work, with social anxiety and making friends or the pressure of achieving. There is everything from mild social anxiety, to school anxiety and even as far as school phobia and school refusal. If you are the parent of such a child, nothing is more painful than feeling helpless in the face of your child’s struggle and suffering.
Every parent wants their children to feel carefree and happy but that has never actually been true – certainly not for all children – and the pressures of our society are just making the problems worse.
NHS statistics indicate that in 2023, 20% (that’s one in five) young people aged from 8 to 16 had a probable mental disorder – a huge increase from 2017, when 12.5 % had a probable mental health disorder. The data suggests that girls are more likely to experience psychological distress and self-harm, while other statistics show that LGBTQ+ young people are especially likely to develop mental ill health.
Schools obviously have an important role in tackling this problem, but so do we as parents, although we aren’t taught how to approach these kinds of problems and, as a result, we feel helpless and hopeless if we aren’t able to access specialist help for our child.
I strongly believe that we need to teach children how to be brave and resilient and give them tools that they can use – through the rest of their life – that will enable them to manage increased stress and anxiety in a less damaging way. Avoiding stressful situations isn’t helpful – it just teaches us that we are weak and encourages a ‘victim’ mentality. What we need to encourage is a ‘have a go’ bravery that will build resilience and show children that hard situations can be managed and they do have lots of internal resources they can rely on.
This approach has worked well with the children and teenagers who come to see me. The tools of hypnotherapy are easily learnt and adaptable to many types of anxiety-inducing situation.
Of course, teenagers often begin to struggle when they are facing public exams, whether GCSEs or A levels. The pressures of these exams can be considerable and debilitating but hypnotherapy can certainly help. Earlier this year I had two teenagers coming to see me, both with a variety of exam anxiety. One of these students struggled with self-confidence and self-belief, coupled with unhelpful, negative automatic thoughts about what needed to be done to achieve the required results. The other student struggled with motivation to do the work required, leading to extreme symptoms of stomach pain and sickness on the day of an exam because the student knew that they could have been much better prepared and they had let themselves down.
In many ways, these were opposite problems. But both students responded very well to the tools of hypnotherapy, which improved motivation to do the work required, enabled more effective habits to be introduced, improved self-confidence and self-esteem, reduced fear and panic and enabled both these students to reach their A level exams feeling prepared, motivated and knowing they had tools to use to manage any residual anxiety. Both did well and achieved what they needed!
At the other end of the spectrum, hypnotherapy has helped several of my younger clients manage the transition to secondary school with all of the challenges that represents in terms of managing workload, making new friends, finding their place in the social hierarchy and knowing that anxiety is something that they needn’t be fearful of as they know how to control it.
As I explained to one 11-year-old I was seeing:” You are learning skills that you will be able to use for the rest of your life, you will know that you can control that scared feeling, it isn’t something that you need to run away from. And you are better off than other 11-year-olds because you will know that you are strong and resilient and can deal with all sorts of difficult situations, thoughts and feelings.”
There is a compelling need to address this failure to tackle mental health issues at a medical and society level, but we parents can also play a role. And we can start helping our children become braver and more resilient as soon as we notice any problems. As well as helping individual children use hypnosis to manage their anxiety problems, I also teach parents how they can help their child. I offer a programme called ‘Parent-led cognitive behavioural therapy’ in which I work with the parent, and not the child, to help the parent to identify their child’s issue, what is causing the anxiety, and work step-by-step to encourage the child to be braver, to challenge themselves with good results, to recognise that negative thoughts aren’t truths, and to learn how to become more resilient.
So, whether your child is just showing the early signs of becoming anxious or has been struggling for a while, don’t despair, but take some action. Hypnotherapy can help your child learn how to cope with their struggles much more effectively and you yourself can learn how to help your child with a programme such as the parent-led CBT. I’m happy to talk to anyone who would like to learn more about any of these approaches.
Further information:
Parent-Led CBT for Child Anxiety: helping parents help their kids. Cresswell C et al, 2019, The Guildford Press
https://www.thelancet.com/pb-assets/Lancet/stories/commissions/youth-mental-health/policy-1723555044810.pdf
Comments