Lose Weight After Pregnancy

No parent wants their child to go through life fearful and anxious. If a child doesn’t learn how to handle anxiety effectively while they are growing up they are very likely to have life-long issues. Because untreated anxiety can affect a person’s entire life, appropriate child anxiety treatment is important.

Kids have trouble holding emotions in and so their emotions often get expressed as undesirable behavior in other forms of acting out. Exactly how it gets acted out varies from child to child. Under stress, a child may become aggressive. Or they may become depressed.

Part of growing up is learning to manage personal or social situations that may generate anxiety. As a parent, part of your job is to help your child learn how to handle normal degrees of anxiety successfully so it doesn’t interfere with their living life well. Right now I want to tell you about an exercise that will help you coach your children, especially young children.

Young children don’t think abstractly. The word “anxiety” doesn’t have much meaning for them as an abstract idea. However, all children are experts at recognizing facial expressions. Therefore, pictures of people experiencing different emotions can help a child gain an understanding of the Rowley emotions play in life.

For example, you could look at a picture of a happy child and ask questions such as “What do you think that boy feels like?”, “Why do you think he’s feeling like that?” “What do you think he’s thinking?.”  You can also have fun with your child making up stories about what’s wonderful about the lives of the happy children in the pictures.

Next, you can look at pictures of children that appear anxious and ask questions about them. If you ask your child why the child in the picture looks worried it’s possible that they may answer with something they’re afraid of. Even if that doesn’t happen, you can ask your child questions about what the worried child in the picture could do to feel better. After your child answers, or if they don’t, you could tell them some ways of acting that you think might be helpful. For example, you could say something like “Well if I was that boy and I was worried about being left alone, I think I talk to mom and dad about it.”

Part of what you want to do with this exercise is both the children realize that it’s normal to experience a range of emotions in life and that there are helpful ways of dealing with them available to them.

You can find a lot of other ideas about helping kids deal with anxiety at Childhood Anxiety Disorder Help, which is a site dedicated to helping parents help their kids. You may also want to look at an excellent program called the Anxiety Free Child. With the help of their program, you can coach your child on how to reclaim their joy.

Tags: Anxiety, child anxiety treatment, childhood anxiety treatment, panic

This entry was posted on Monday, July 12th, 2010 at 5:56 pm and is filed under pregnancy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.