Seattle Mama Doc™

I find the back-to-school time period to be a little bit stressful (hellowwww, understatement) and perhaps even anxiety inducing. Even good transitions rack up stress. As we brace for the holiday weekend and expect the onslaught of school in earnest while September unfolds, I suggest we can decrease the stress with a bit of info. Here’s my 12-minute podcast to support you as you send your kids back to school and set them up for an awesome start. We’re all hoping for a healthy, safe fall. Take a listen…it won’t take long and you may find yourself a little more relaxed and ready for the chaos. Immunizations, sleep, anxiety and tips for transitions!

Tips For Getting Sleep Schedules Ready For School:

• Timing: Shift slowly and get started now. If bedtime has migrated to 10pm, for example, and you’re hoping to have your kids sleeping by 8pm for school, start now. Move bedtime forward about 30 minutes every 3 to 4 days.
• Screens (this isn’t new, I know): Screens, using them and exposing ourselves to the light they emit, impairs our natural sleep hormone melatonin from rising and helping our brain drift off to sleep. Have all screens, tablets, phones, and laptops transition back to sleeping in the kitchen (not at the bedside). In minimum, turn off screens at least 1 hour before desired bedtime!
• Sleep As Health: getting sufficient sleep contributes to improved attention, safer driving, less health risks, and a more steady mood. We’re nicer when we sleep! It also contributes to how we think on life and even how we remember events; when we don’t sleep we tend to remember things in more somber light. Getting enough sleep supports a healthier life and I would suggest an even happier one. Quick reminder: school-aged children need 9 to 11 hours of sleep and teens need 8 1/2 to 9 1/2 hours. Really!

No question it’s tough to keep our cool when our children are unraveling. It’s especially a challenge when our children are rattled and over-run with anxiety. I partner with parents on a weekly basis who feel their children are anxious. All of us want support in knowing just what TO DO in helping our children thrive while also not letting them suffer.

I partnered with Dr. Kathy Melman on the podcast to review tips and strategies for parenting when children are anxious or when our children suffer from anxiety. Dr. Melman is wonderfully steady and clear in knowing what we can do when we find ourselves amid a sea of anxiety. Dr. Melman explains how to improve the environment for our children, what we can do for ourselves as parents to protect our children, and how to help our children not only cope but thrive in the face of anxiety, disruption, fear, and challenge. Listen in and read her 6 tips below. Number four is a BIGGIE…

6 ways to Help Your Anxious Child:

1. Modeling Matters: If a parent struggles with anxiety—get evidence based cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) treatment with an adult anxiety specialist. Caring for your own anxiety will limit how your child models undesired behaviors.
2. Intervene early and effectively! If your child shows signs of anxiety that is causing distress and/or interfering with functioning, seek CBT treatment with a child anxiety specialist. Don’t wait years for help because untreated anxiety can lead to problems including possible school refusal, lack of friends and opportunities to develop social skills, limited development of independence, healthy sleep patterns, lack of involvement in activities outside of the home, substance use and depression as one’s life shrinks with loneliness, low self esteem (“I can’t handle this”) and lack of building mastery. Anxious children often don’t get the help they need and when they do, they have often already suffered for years, other problems have developed, and they often don’t get the most effective, evidence based behavioral treatment.
3. Acceptance and Empathy: Accept if your child is “wired together” to have more anxiety and be empathic, rather than invalidating, of their experience. Taking the moment to accept their feelings (even when they seem outlandish!) will allow you to both acknowledge and then support your child more effectively.
4. Don’t Permit Avoidance: It is really hard to see your child suffer and parents often, meaning well, allow their child to escape and avoid anxiety provoking situations. As a parent, it is important to learn to tolerate this distress, remain calm and know that permitting escape and avoidance and providing excessive reassurance only strengthens anxiety, reinforces your child’s thoughts that the world is a scary place and the belief that they aren’t capable of coping effectively. This is an important dance parents often do with their anxious children and it is critical to change this pattern.
5. Reward Brave Behavior: Instead of paying attention to anxious behavior, reward use of anxiety management skills (recognizing when anxious, which situations trigger anxiety, what happens in your body, what are your thoughts, calming your body, challenging unrealistic, catastrophic thinking with checking the facts to develop more realistic thinking along with coping and calming thoughts, and approach feared situations in a gradual, manageable, step by step fashion). We are asking our children to do what terrifies them so provide them with empathy, support, skills and coaching so they overcome anxiety by facing their fears and learning that they can, in fact, do this, nothing terrible will happen, and they can live a full life that is not limited by anxiety. Rewarding use of skills and facing fears (known as exposure) helps your child do what is challenging. Exposure is the most important ingredient in effective treatment of anxiety.
6. Be Involved in your Child’s CBT Anxiety Treatment: Parental involvement is critical for many reasons including learning about anxiety disorders and their treatment, learning which parenting strategies increase and which decrease child anxiety, learning to coach your child in use of anxiety management skills in challenging moments, not permitting the dance of avoidance, modeling use of skills and brave behavior, learning to tolerate when your child is experiencing distress and responding with empathy and approach, providing many opportunities for exposures and rewarding brave behavior. Parents can also use their understanding of anxiety disorders and their effective treatment to communicate important information with schools, coaches, grandparents and other involved caregivers and settings.

No question, hands down, I get more requests from friends, family, and acquaintances for help finding support and and advice parenting anxious children than any other pediatric issue in the school years. So it’s my sincere DELIGHT to introduce and partner with Dr. Kathy Melman on my podcast. Dr Melman runs the outpatient psychiatry and behavioral health clinic and has decades of experience advising families and supporting anxious children. She helps translate the facts around what causes anxiety, how to discern anxious behavior from clinical anxiety, and helps parents understand just what we know and what we don’t. Her tips and advice below!

Where Does Anxiety Come From?

1. Anxiety is a normal emotion and a natural part of life. Fear exists in all of us and there are typical fears that are seen at different developmental stages such as Stranger Anxiety (clinging and crying) at 7-9 months of age. This happens as the child goes through developmental changes such as the stronger ability to differentiate familiar faces from those that are unfamiliar. Anxiety is a normal and important emotion that is adaptive and protective. For example, anxiety helps us stay away from dangerous situations such as leaving or not entering a building when we see smoke or fire or smell something burning. Imagine living at a time or in a place without grocery stores or restaurants for securing food, without homes with locking windows and doors. Imagine that we instead have to venture out to hunt and gather food with concern about dangerous animals or people lurking behind a bush. In this situation, concern about safety is warranted and being vigilant, scanning the environment to pick up on danger cues would help someone survive. The rush of adrenaline that occurs when highly anxious is called the “fight or flight” response and it helps someone escape or avoid dangerous situations.

2. Environmental Stress: Anxiety increases in more stressful situations. This can includes fear of safety, homelessness, instability with frequent moves or other important life changes, loss or death of caregivers or other important people, war, hearing or seeing disturbing news, economic difficulties, abuse, sexual assault, bullying at school, high pressure, expectations and demands in school, home and/or activities. Even in healthy, safe environments, all children experience some anxiety. For example, occasional or short lived worries occur when a child is faced with an especially stressful or new, unfamiliar situation. These are real issues with all that is going on in the world right now.

3. Environmental Learning: Dr. Melman reminds, “Children Learn What Children Live.” Modeling matters. Listen to what Dr. Melman shares in the podcast about overprotection and the risks of being over-involved.

4. Avoidance. Anxiety is maintained and strengthened by avoidance. Through avoidance, you don’t get to see that your worst fears will not happen and that you can, in fact, do it! Let’s look at an example of a child invited for a sleepover at a friend’s house. Perhaps this child is not experienced with sleeping away from home and struggles with sleeping in his own room and bed at home. The idea of a sleepover sounds fun and then reality hits as the time to go to sleep approaches. The child becomes panicked, maybe with physical symptoms such as heart racing and pounding and stomach aches. He has thoughts that he won’t be able to fall asleep or that something bad will happen like a robber breaking in, and calls his parents to pick him up which they do. The child starts to feel relieved and no longer anxious as soon as they learn that they can escape this feared situation by going home. The child’s fear and desire to escape and avoid is strengthened because of the strong relief is experienced when rescued and by the fact that parents agreed that there was a need to come home rather than an ability to cope, ride out this wave of distress, stay the night and see that nothing bad happened and that he could, in fact, be courageous!

5. Expecting Bad Things to Happen: Anxious thinking also plays a role in where anxiety comes from.

6. Genes: Anxiety Disorders runs in families. What can we do if our child has a genetic loading for anxiety disorders? While we can’t change genes, we can aim to reduce stress in our lives and change our own modeling and reactions. We can learn to understand and accept our child’s temperament/wiring and empathize with our child’s feelings while also teaching our children how to think more realistically about the world, to expect less danger in situations, and encourage our child to approach in a gradual and consistent manner the situations that he or she fears. We can give our children skills to cope more effectively with challenging situations.