Understanding the concept of thoughts is a challenge, even for adults. To help kids understand the fundamentals about thoughts and how they impact our emotions start with picking up this book. 

Includes:

How to Reduce Stress & Anxiety in Children

As someone that grew up as an anxious child and grew into an anxious adult, I've learned first hand how the mind and the body respond to anxiety. With my decades of learning to cope, I've learned some amazing tools and I'm excited to share them with you. It's worth acknowledging that the best approach is to reduce stress for the whole household. So what I am going to share will outline activities for all members of the family. 

We need to think of the house, and the stresses within it, and how we can work to better manage our daily anxiety. No matter our age, we all have various triggers that will cause us to feel stressed or anxious. Think back to when you were a child, what were some of your triggers. Children are exposed to stress in lots of different forms. For example, there could be financial stress in the home, or marital stress. Or for many kids it’s an underlying stress that they won’t be seen or heard because their parents are too busy with work. As we develop our sense of self, it’s important for us to feel seen and heard. There are many things that compete for a parent's attention and being a present mother or father can be a huge challenge.

The power of mindfulness really comes into play when we start to pull the thread of anxiety. When you are not are not being present in your life, and allow our racing thoughts to take over, you risk being stressed out and your stress can impact your children. Now, I know it’s not realistic to be completely present and mindful all the time. There are PTA meetings, the big work presentation, soccer games, piano lessons and a thousand other things to juggle. But it is worth exploring some key times that you can carve out as dedicated, and fully present time. This can mean a no phone/no screen time for the whole family in order to be together and focused on each other. 

Clark Goldstein, PhD from the Child Mind Institute reminds us “None of us wants to see a child unhappy, but the best way to help kids overcome anxiety isn’t to try to remove stressors that trigger it. It’s to help them learn to tolerate their anxiety and function as well as they can, even when they’re anxious. And as a byproduct of that, the anxiety will decrease or fall away over time.”

Photo: Author age 5 

To help identify and reduce stress in your household, I am going to cover these topics:

What Are the Signs of an Anxious Child?

All children will be prone to worry and anxiety from time to time. Changes in their life like moving to a new house, or going back to school are examples of what might cause any child to have anxiety. For children that suffer from anxiety on an ongoing/daily basis, here are some symptoms NHS outline to watch for: 

It's good to watch for these signs and speak to a professional if the symptoms are ongoing. 

If your child is experiencing any of these anxiety symptoms having them speak to a child psychologist can help them learn tools and strategies to reduce their anxiety. The foundations they build through counselling can be carried with them into adulthood helping them reduce anxiety over their lifespan. If you're not sure if that's the right path you can always consult your family physician for their opinion and for a referral. 

If your child is suffering from anxiety "A Thought is a Thought" is a helpful tool to help them learn to cope and manage negative thoughts.  

Common Causes of Child Anxiety 

If you've noticed that your child is anxious, it may be one of these common sources. 

What to Say to Calm Your Anxious Child 

Talking to your child about their anxiety is critical to helping them cope and reduce their stress. The Institute of Child Psychology has some great tips on how to approach the conversation and to help the child feel safe. Anxiety is tied to the feeling of fear and parents need to help calm the part of their child’s brain that is screaming “Danger, Danger!”. It’s important to help them learn what is a true danger, like seeing a bear in the woods, and what is an unproductive, anxious thought.

The Institute of Child Psychology recommends moving close and trying some of these phrases. But it is recommended parents do something to help their child calm their body first. “A child cannot calm thoughts if their bodies aren’t calm”. For example yoga, deep breathing, being held, exercise or gross motor play all help calm the body.

Here are some of my favourite phrases recommended by the Institute of Child Psychology to calm your child.

It can be hard when your child's anxiety seems out of control, but being kind and connecting with your child will help them overcome the anxious thought. 

What To Do When Your Child’s is Panicking 

Your child is panicking. They have worked themselves up with a barrage of negative thoughts. This simple practice of grounding yourself by connecting with your senses is a quick and easy way to calm racing thoughts. When you can see your child is working themselves up into an anxious spell, help them re-focus their attention to the here and now. The easiest way to do this is to connect with your senses. Connecting with your senses brings the attention back into the body and away from the racing negative thought. You can use any of these prompts to help anchor and calm your child.

Using Your Senses: 

Dr. Chatter Jee's 5 Questions

Let’s demonstrate what this might look like in a real life scenario.

Things That Help Calm Anxiety

When you or your child are feeling anxious, try one of these activities to help calm the mind. 

Taking the time to help reduce anxiety is always time well spent. 

Emotions & Feelings (Introducing RULER)

Growing up in the 80’s meant we didn’t spend much time learning about our feelings or emotions. The emotional spectrum was somewhere in the range of happy, mad, or sad. We didn’t spend much time learning the differences between a feeling or an emotion. So in case it’s helpful, here’s a quick refresher:

Feeling (Feel-ing): noun

an emotional state or reaction. “a feeling of joy”

A belief, especially a vague or irrational one “he had the feeling that he was being watched.

Emotion (E-mo-tion): noun

1. a natural instinctive state of mind deriving from one's circumstances, mood, or relationships with others.

"she was attempting to control her emotions"

A fundamental difference between feelings and emotions is that feelings are experienced consciously, while emotions manifest either consciously or subconsciously.

Bryn Farnsworth, Ph.D (Imotions) distinguishes the two by saying: “While emotions are associated with bodily reactions that are activated through neurotransmitters and hormones released by the brain, feelings are the conscious experience of emotional reactions.” 

It’s no surprise that we have a hard time identifying our own emotions and feelings, let alone help our children to identify and regulate their own emotions. 

The great news is that Marc Brackett has developed an amazing program that is introducing emotions into the classroom through RULER. 

Introducing RULER 

“RULER is an evidence-based approach to social and emotional learning (SEL) developed at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, where Marc Brackett is the founding Director." (www.marcbrackett.com)  

The core of RULER:

Understanding the value of emotions

Building the skills of emotional intelligence

Creating and maintaining a positive school climate

RULER is an acronym for the five skills of emotional intelligence:

If RULER isn’t being offered at your child’s school, there are still ways to bring the work of Marc Brackett into your home.

One of my favourite tools of the RULER system is the Mood Meter. When we understand how someone is showing up, we are better able to adapt to their needs, especially when it’s a child. The mood meter works by creating a grid that features a variety of moods ranging from high energy to low energy and low and high pleasantness. 

This Mood Meter is used to help kids identify how they are feeling. Needless to say there are a few more options beyond my “happy, mad, sad.”

There are many versions of this poster that can be found online but if you are digitally inclined, I am partial to tracking on the Mood Meter app.

Brain Training - How to Encourage Your Anxious Child to Have More Positive Thoughts

We have thoughts all day every day, and unfortunately, many of them are negative. When it comes to shifting our mindset, it’s important to replace negative thoughts with positive thoughts. One quick way to help train your brain to think more positivity is to have a daily practice of repeating positive affirmations. This is especially important for children that suffer from anxiety as their brains often are scanning for threats and need more support identifying the good.

If you are a parent or caretaker of an anxious child, you have the opportunity to help them develop positive self-esteem and build their resiliency by teaching them a daily affirmation practice. It also builds confidence, which is key in reducing stress in worrisome children.

Some simple positive affirmations for kids are:

Take some time each day to repeat these statements out loud with your child. It will help reduce negative self-talk and can make the child feel good about themselves as they embrace their positive qualities. Doing this exercise daily will help retrain and reprogram the brain to have more positive thoughts. 

The more we repeat a phrase, the more likely it is to become a hardwired belief. It’s also important to keep the phrase in the present tense. Not “I will be kind” or “I was kind” but “I am kind.” This feeds the brain the message that you are kind. It’s not a future plan or a memory of a kind act, it is who you are. 

Developing some positive affirmations with your child, either the ones suggested above, or your own can be an excellent exercise. Remember to keep them short for ease of memory and repetition. You’ll find a resource that outlines some of my favourite positive affirmations here but also a blank worksheet to allow your child to develop their own positive affirmations. Once you’ve decided on your key positive affirmations, it’s recommended you have your child repeat them three times a day. The more consistent they are in repeating the phrases, the more resilient they will be to negative thoughts. 

If you’re looking for a visual daily reminder, you can also print a positive affirmation poster.

Tapping to Reduce Child Anxiety

Tapping (also known as EFT) is a new tool to help people, including children, reduce anxiety. While there is still more research to be done on EFT there have been many success cases. If you decide to pursue this alternative therapy for your child or yourself,  consult with your doctor first to reduce the likelihood of injury or worsening symptoms. 

Emotional freedom technique (EFT) is an alternative treatment for physical pain and emotional distress. It’s also referred to as tapping or psychological acupressure.

Tapping helps release anxiety and negative emotions by tapping on a key set of meridians in the body.

It’s important to express the thought you are feeling as you are doing the tapping to help release the emotion. A common way to set it up is:

The phrase would be something along the lines of:

“Even though I have this [negative thought, fear or problem], I love and accept myself.”

Examples scenarios for kids:

“Even though I’m scared to go to school, I love and accept myself.”

“Even though I might not do well on my test, I love and accept myself.”

“Even though my friend is mad at me, I love and accept myself.”

The thought statement must focus on what the person doing the tapping is experiencing. It needs to be in first person. Even though “I’m afraid..I’m sad…I’m anxious…I’m scared...I love and accept myself.” The person will express all the things that are making them feel uncomfortable and then express that despite all those things, they love and accept themselves.

 EFT mainly focuses on these nine meridians. It is recommended that you tap these areas in the order as laid out below. 

Healthline.com instructs that you "begin by tapping the karate chop point while simultaneously reciting your setup phrase three times. Then, tap each following point seven times, moving down the body in this ascending order":

After tapping the underarm point, finish the sequence at the top of the head point.

Here's a quick intro video on the tapping points and how to tap from The Tapping Solution.

How to Highlight a Child’s Strengths to Build Resilience

Once you’ve introduced positive affirmations into your family, and if you’ve done the personalized affirmations worksheet, you will have identified what your child is good at. Building up the self esteem of your anxious child will help them with resilience. It will help them feel better when they come up against things they aren’t good at since they know intrinsically they have other strengths. 

When there is a time when your child is anxious, perhaps they have a test in school or they are having a sleepover for the first time, you can encourage them that they are loved no matter what happens. You can also remind them of their strengths and what they like about themselves to give them a boost as they go into an unfamiliar or uncertain experience.  

“You can’t promise a child that his fears are unrealistic.... But you can express confidence that he’s going to be okay, he will be able to manage it, and that, as he faces his fears, the anxiety level will drop over time. This gives him confidence that your expectations are realistic, and that you’re not going to ask him to do something he can’t handle.” Clark Goldstein, PhD from the Child Mind Institute.

It can take vulnerability to admit when you are not good at something, but showing your child that you too have strengths AND weaknesses, shows them that it’s ok to fail. This is particularly key if you have a perfectionist child. It’s just as important to celebrate the wins as it is to acknowledge that it’s ok when we don’t quite make our goal. Maybe they missed the shot at the hockey game and the team lost the game, or maybe they made some mistakes during their dance recital. Anxious children’s brains can get stuck in a negative feedback loop replaying the scenario over and over again. They will question why they didn’t do it better. 

This is because “Perfectionists establish unrealistic goals for themselves. Then, they place enormous pressure on themselves to try and reach their goals. They engage in all-or-nothing thinking. Whether it’s a 99 on a math test or 9 out of 10 foul shots made, perfectionists declare their performance a dismal failure when they fall short of their goals.1”

Brene Brown says “First and foremost, we need to be the adults we want our children to be. We should watch our own gossiping and anger. We should model the kindness we want to see. I think it’s also very powerful to tell our children stories of our own experiences. When did we feel left out or alone? When did we join in when kids were making fun of someone and how did that make us feel?1” Take the time to empathize with your anxious child, even when you think they are overreacting. What seems minor to you can be major for them, and undermining it or sweeping it under the rug doesn’t help your child cope, it just makes them feel more alone. 

Brene Brown does amazing work to showcase the difference between empathy and sympathy. This video breaks it down quickly.

Remember as a parent to avoid sentences that start with “at least….” It’s really hard not to want to just make it feel better. To remind them that their situation isn’t as bad as others. For example, “At least you have a warm roof over your head.” This is true, but their pain in that moment is also true, and it’s important to focus on connection and not comparison in this moment. 

There is a time and a place for gratitude. And gratitude is another great tool to help children build resilience. But the time for gratitude is not in the middle of a crisis. Trying to rain down things that they should be grateful for while they are in pain can turn their negative thought into a feeling of guilt, because ultimately, they can still feel the feeling and now they feel like they shouldn’t. It’s a double whammy. It’s much more productive to take this moment to have a “me too” relatable connection than a comparison of who has it worse.

Failure is a key part of life. But for an anxious child it is harder to cope with than a child that doesn’t suffer from anxiety. As the parent of an anxious child, it’s key not to guard them from the pain but to teach them resilience when they are faced with failure or painful words from others. Dr. Shefali Tsabary breaks it down in this short video and really reminds parents of their role in guiding their child through hard situations versus avoiding the situation to reduce pain.

Sympathy makes people feel “othered”? and empathy helps them feel “connected”.

Now that we’ve gone over how to help when your child has a set back, let’s get back to playing up strengths in the household. I say household because it’s great to get the whole family involved. Maybe you take time to talk about one thing you’re proud of each day during dinner. This helps reframe that something positive has happened and gives each family member a little boost knowing they had a victory that day. It’s a good time to reinforce the strengths your child has. For example, if they did well on their spelling test highlight the reasons they were able to achieve that. “All that hard work studying paid off. I know you put a lot of effort into learning those words. It took you focus and attention. Great job.”  

To deepen the value of helping your anxious child build resilience, Dr Jordan Peterson reminds us of the importance of teaching your child how strong they are to prepare them for the world and the inevitable hardships they will face.

Gratitude Practice for Kids to Reduce Anxiety

The benefits of having a gratitude practice is that it helps program your brain to seek the positive. Anxious children tend to spend a lot of time thinking about the negatives, what can go wrong, what they could have done better. So a gratitude practice can help ensure they are taking some time out of each day to think about positive thoughts. 

A great time to incorporate a gratitude practice is into your bedtime routine. Depending on the age of the child you can take a different approach. For children between the age of 4-7 during storytime/tuck in time you can make it a habit of expressing 1-2 things you are grateful for from the day together. For older children, 7+, you can purchase a gratitude journal that they can write in. This is a great habit to get in early on and continue into adulthood. As they say, practice what you preach so I recommend picking up your own gratitude journal. 

I use the 2 min morning. It’s a quick and simple one that you can slide into your day. 

Both you and your anxious child will reap from having a gratitude practice as “Studies show that gratitude for kids can be a very powerful tool, with lots of benefits to mental and physical health. They include things like4:”

All of these benefits directly combat anxiety and stress in children. But journaling and naming things you and your child are grateful for are not the only ways to bring gratitude into your life.

Here are some other gratitude ideas that can help:

Please and Thank You’s

Ensuring you and the family are expressing appreciation for the little and big things throughout your day. 

Get Creative

Have your child make a craft that helps them express what they are grateful for. You can make a jar that you fill with little sentences about what you’re grateful for. Or you can have your child draw or paint a picture of something they are grateful for. 

Helping Others

Giving back to others can make kids feel a sense of community and build positivity in their lives. Bake cookies together and share with the neighbour. 

Replace “I’m sorry” with “Thank you”

I love this one. “Be mindful of your language and try this little experiment. Instead of saying, “Sorry I’m late”, try, “Thanks for waiting for me.” Instead of “I’m sorry I can’t make it to your party,” try, “Thank you for inviting me, I really appreciate it.4” This helps you turn the focus away from the negative and towards the positive. Making small changes to the way we say things, helps us to change the way we think about things, too.” Says Sarah Conway from Mindful Little Minds.  

As Ester Perel points out in her podcast with Lewis Howes from the School of Greatness, there are huge benefits to expressing appreciation to your partner. Your child lives within the ecosystem of your home and expressing love and appreciation to your partner also helps set the foundation for healthy relationships as adults.

Positive Childhood Experiences That Shape Mental Health in Adulthood

When you or your child are feeling anxious, try one of these activities to help calm the mind. 

Building this secure foundation helps your child face future challenges.  

Fight Flight Freeze – Anxiety Explained for Kids

Anxiety Canada created this great video to help explain "Flight Flight Freeze" to kids. In this video kids will learn how anxiety is a normal biological response – called “Fight, Flight, Freeze” – that can get triggered inappropriately in the modern world.