The No Worries Guide to Raising Your Anxious Child by Karen Lynn Cassiday

Author:Karen Lynn Cassiday
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Jessica Kingsley Publishers
Published: 2021-09-21T00:00:00+00:00

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Your child’s greatest opportunity to develop resilience and the ability to recover quickly from stress is when they have to repeatedly face disappointing and frustrating situations.

What is the advantage to your child in encountering the dilemmas of living in an imperfect world that cannot be made better or easier? They will have the opportunity to learn how to thrive when they encounter the unexpected or the challenging. These situations teach your child how to become effective by refocusing upon what they can control, regardless of the situation. Your child learns that ultimately the only thing possible to control is their own attitude and behavior and that this can be powerful in achieving their goals when things get rough. Having frequent encounters with less than ideal situations also prepares your child for the inevitable future life they will lead when some of their bosses, supervisors, professors or workmates will inevitably not be to their liking. It prepares them to succeed and be productive when life has its rough and unpleasant moments. Being able to tolerate people who are less than your best friend is a very important skill for someone who wants to live well, experience joy, maintain employment and raise a family. Be honest, how many times has your work group, sports team or volunteer group been filled with all of your favorite people who always do their bit really well with a pleasant expression on their face? Don’t you have to encounter difficult people and disappointment on a regular basis? Do you really want these encounters to cost you a lot of emotional energy and recovery time? In my home, my husband and I know that the only one who is always easy to get along with is the family dog. That means we try to be low key about all of the other encounters that might be less than lovely in order to feel full of joy and good humor.

This expectation of current and future happiness also impairs parents of anxious children, perhaps like you. When you believe that your child should be happy and easier to raise than what you are currently experiencing, you accidentally risk evaluating your parenting and home life as being a failure. You increase the likelihood that you will panic, worry and get depressed just because your child exhibits symptoms of anxiety and unhappiness. Your child notices your reaction to their distress and then comes to the same faulty conclusion, “Something must be terribly wrong!” They react to your unnecessary distress and get entangled with your faulty assumption that something really is terribly wrong instead of realizing that they need to get on with the task of learning how to manage their anxiety or how to manage an unpleasant situation. They become more distressed and less capable of effective coping.

Research suggests that if you are a parent of a child with an anxiety disorder, then you are more likely to be perfectionistic (Robinson, 2020). Perfectionism occurs when someone has an overly narrow

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