Secret #49: Parenting Your Anxious Child
Navigating the turbulent waters of parenting an anxious child might just hold the key to fostering resilience and emotional growth in both parents and kids alike. In this episode, hosts Emma Waddington and Chris McCurry engage in a meaningful dialogue about the reality of anxiety in parenting and how it not only affects parents but also their children.
They explore the evolutionary roots of anxiety, emphasizing that it's a natural, baked-in response meant to protect us. By normalizing anxiety as part of the parenting journey, the hosts empower listeners with strategies to support children who exhibit anxious tendencies.
Their candid conversation includes practical tools like the acronym "SOBER," offering a structured approach to handling anxious moments effectively. With the importance of modeling resilience and defining family values, Emma and Chris illuminate how parents can guide their children toward greater independence and emotional well-being.
This episode is brimming with insightful strategies and compassionate advice, making it a valuable resource for any parent seeking to better understand and navigate anxiety within their family lives. Listen in to discover how embracing, rather than battling, anxiety can lead to a deeper connection with your child and a more fulfilling family dynamic.
Highlights:
Understanding Anxiety
Parent and Child Dynamics with Anxiety
Temperament and Anxiety
Influence of Social Media and Society on Anxiety
Recognizing Problematic Anxiety
Parental Strategies and Coping Mechanisms
Timestamps:
00:00 Rising Youth Anxiety Concerns
03:44 Parenting: Anxieties and Challenges
08:57 Parental Anxiety's Impact on Children
09:51 Encouraging Resilience in Children
14:15 Exploring Shades of Anxiety
18:13 Anxiety's Behavioral Challenges
21:45 Anxiety and Adrenaline: A Contrast
23:11 "Coping Out Loud" Techniques
27:06 Emotional Validation in Parenting
30:33 Clarifying Priorities for Parenting Decisions
33:55 Navigating Children's Anxiety as Parents
37:58 Toxic Overachievement and Child Anxiety
41:47 Anxiety's Impact on Child Behavior
ORDER Justin Case Sits with Anxiety: An Acceptance and Commitment Therapy Workbook for Ages 8-12 (ACT Workbook Series for Kids)
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Secret #49: Parenting Your Anxious Child
Introduction to Life's Dirty Little Secrets
[00:00:00]
Chris McCurry: Hello, and welcome to Life's Dirty Little Secrets. I'm Chris McCurry.
Transcription Chris and I to talk about anxious parents and anxious children. We felt this is a really important conversation and topic. We know many people who are anxious. We ourselves have moments of anxiety. I especially do as a parent And we were hoping to shed some light. on, you know, perhaps how we can relate to anxiety differently, how we can think about our parenting and how we can support our anxious children. Perhaps we can kick off thinking firstly about what is anxiety and really how normal it is and why is it so common? Why is anxiety so common? And maybe Chris, you can kick off with that.
would start by, by just [00:01:00] going back to what you were saying a moment ago. Parenting is the most anxiety provoking thing I've ever done in my life.
Emma Waddington: there really is.
Chris McCurry: And will be forever. You know, even though my child is now 30 he's still, It gives me lots of opportunities to be anxious about them, whether they're realistic or not.
But, you know, anxiety is so prevalent because we are all the descendants of the paranoid people. It's sort of baked into our evolution as a species because all the complacent non anxious people got eaten before they, you know, reached reproductive age. And so, you know, every one of our ancestors got by and survived by being a little bit paranoid, and it worked.
Unfortunately, so much of society today is well, I mean, we're recording [00:02:00] this
As Los Angeles is burning, so I can't say that, you know, we live in an anxiety free world. Obviously, we don't. There's a lot to be anxious about.
Modern Society and Anxiety in Youth
Chris McCurry: And with media and social media it's just gets pushed into our faces all the time.
And our kids are dealing with this, and there's a lot of pressure on kids. So, anxiety as well as depression have increased in youth in the last couple of decades. And that's not just an artifact of Being better at assessing these things and having more knowledge about them and awareness of them, things really are, you know, heating up in terms of the stress that people are under and it's showing up and on all these different ways.
Emma Waddington: And that's despite the fact that we live in a safer world than we did, maybe not 20 years ago, but certainly 50 years ago. Despite that, we're still [00:03:00] getting more and more anxious.
Chris McCurry: Yeah, it's an epidemic.
Emma Waddington: Really is. And how do we make sense of that? How do we make sense of the fact that we are getting more and more anxious, both as parents and children.
Chris McCurry: I think we make sense of it in that. In terms of recognizing that there is so much to be anxious about and that it really is part of the deal
When you sign on to be a parent, we may not have read the fine print, but it was there that, you know, here's your child.
Normalizing Anxiety in Parenting
Chris McCurry: Here's your anxiety. I think I mentioned on one of our podcasts before is like, you know, they don't let you leave the hospital without having the inappropriate Our seat for your child and they also hand you this bag of anxiety along with it.
So I think sort of normalizing and in a sense my father was a what they used to call an efficiency expert and solve problems within [00:04:00] companies. And he used to talk about the difference between problems and conditions. And he said, a problem was a situation you don't like. And you look around, you solve the problem by applying some solutions.
A condition, on the other hand, is a situation you don't like, but for which there are no solutions. So the weather is a condition. The weather can cause problems, obviously, as we're seeing in L. A. and in other parts of, you know, the world. Climate change and what have you. But in and of itself, the weather is not something we can really solve or control very readily.
And I think in some situations, anxiety is just a condition. And as I would tell my clients, you know, it's part of the deal. If you're going to be trying out for the school play, you're going to be anxious. If you're, you know, getting ready to take a big exam, if you watch your child drive off for the first time by themselves right after they got their driver's license, you're going to be very anxious.
[00:05:00] It's part of the deal, but when we start seeing anxiety as a problem per se, even though anxiety can cause problems in the sense of keeping us from doing what we need to do, I think it helps just recognize that, yeah, of course I'm anxious, I'm in a situation that would make anybody feel anxious, and so the question is, how do I cope with that?
You
Emma Waddington: for them. Whether it's, you know, when they go on camp, whether it's when they're sick, whether it's when they get their driver's license, I can't bend the thought, you know, the, the the problem is that we care about them, otherwise we wouldn't feel anxiety, and and I guess Like you said, that's a condition of being a parent, that we will feel anxiety for our children.
And I think it [00:06:00] gets even more complicated when our children feel anxiety themselves, like
that's even harder. it's contagious.
Yeah, We feel even more worried for their wellbeing. And With some individuals, like when we think about anxiety we often think about temperament, too.
Some people are more predisposed to being anxious, and any
parent can to, you know, spend a lot of time in our arms and those children are more predisposed to be anxious.
so I think temperament is an important piece to recognize, like you said. You know, perhaps one of the conditions of our children, if they are of a temperament that they're more sensitive, may be anxiety, that they will be
more likely to have it.
Chris McCurry: Yeah, the shy child with the tendency to be more withdrawn, particularly in novel situations. But we like to say that temperament is tendency, [00:07:00] not destiny.
Emma Waddington: Yes.
Chris McCurry: one of the things that I like to do is educate parents and their children about, okay, this is your temperament. This is your temperament. Biological wired in personality style and, you know, some situations in life are going to ask you to override your tendency to stretch a little bit and for the exuberant child, you know, that means
Fill
out a little bit and sit on your little carpet square and circle time and not bug the kid next to you.
That's hard for some kids because of their temperament. Other kids, it's the opposite, where they have to step up in situations that are making them anxious. And by recognizing our tendencies, we can see them as as they begin to appear, and we can have strategies for overriding that tendency when the situation calls for it.
Emma Waddington: And I guess that's where as parents, we can support our children if they have [00:08:00] these tendencies that you could probably see from a fairly young age.
Chris McCurry: Right. The
Parental Influence on Child Anxiety
Emma Waddington: Like I'm thinking of I, I do think part of the reason why we are more anxious than we were is that we'd get a lot of messages about how dangerous the world is like social media can bombard us with these messages and That creates more anxiety in us as parents and inadvertently we tend to be more controlling of our children and I wonder if that's also impacting their anxiety.
So if we see our child has a tendency to be a little bit shyer, a little bit more tentative, we may tend to want to protect them more than our more exuberant child.
Chris McCurry: exuberant child, we have to admonish them not to be, you know, leaping off the You know, the roof of the house with a sheet to see if it works as a parachute so, they get you in other ways, but one of my favorite authors is [00:09:00] Wendy Mogul, who wrote a book called The Blessing of a Skinned Knee, and it's all about not overprotecting your child, and You know, I think kids get the message that the world is a dangerous place when we keep asking them, you know are you feeling anxious?
Are you know, how did it go at school today? Mogul talks about interviewing for pain. You know, the child gets into the car at pickup time at the end of the school day, and the parent immediately launches into did anybody have lunch with you today? Did anybody play with your recess and giving the child the idea that, you know, that the world is fraught with all these, you know, difficult and painful and anxiety provoking situations. I've done this myself, and of course, you want to know what's going on with your child so that you can be helpful if possible. But it does send the message that there is something to be anxious about and Lord knows there are things to be anxious about. We just have to be [00:10:00] careful with that information that we give to our children and that we consume ourselves.
I mean all the stuff that we get. The evening news or wherever. It's probably not very very helpful.
Okay. Oh,
Emma Waddington: of, like you said, baked in. So experiencing anxiety is part of the journey. And I was listening to a conversation on a podcast recently, how, you know there's a word for [00:11:00] sadness and there's a word for depression, but there isn't another word for anxiety.
It's all anxiety. So it's sometimes it's hard to know problematic anxiety from anxiety just is. And I think. perhaps thinking about whether anxiety, our children's anxiety is getting in the way of their life, like they're consistently missing out on play dates or sleepovers or their anxiety is having an impact on our life. Where we're having to accommodate by driving them to school and not taking us an extra hour to get to work. Or I guess it's when anxiety is making, is taking up too much space in our lives or our children's life that we need to start to think about how to support our child. whether it's at home or with additional help.
Chris McCurry: sure. It's, for me, it's to what extent are the anxious thoughts and feelings [00:12:00] interfering with it. The child or the parent, any adult interfering with their ability to do age appropriate and necessary tasks like, you know, at some point, you know, depending on what's, you know, family traditions. Most kids learn to sleep on their own.
They learn to you know, go to school and deal with everything there. You know, the golf university, whatever it may be. And if you just have the feeling as a parent that, his peers are doing these X, Y, and Z things and he's not and he's been blaming or I'm blaming anxiety on it, then it's getting in the way, then it becomes an impediment to living a full values based life.
But I would actually disagree that we don't have more words for anxiety. In fact I should mention to our listeners that Emma and I have some books coming out. The spring, the first one being on anxiety, which is coming [00:13:00] out in the end of mark and in it, we do talk about a lot of different words for anxious and nervous feelings, you know, trepidation, and I even came across the word fan tods.
Which is an old word meaning a case of the willies, you know, like like, whoa, you know,
that.
When look at that rollercoaster gave me a case of the phantoms but you know there's shadings of anxiety, you know there's being pensive and then there's being, you know then it shades into fear, which is a more physiological here and now, you know, feeling of, you know impending doom or you know, terror or things like that.
So one of the ways that we can help our kids is to, you know, give them some good vocabulary around their emotions so that they can actually see the shades of difference between being nervous and being [00:14:00] terrified. And I guess as parents, we need those words too, actually that's
Emma Waddington: true. I, that that part in the book is really helpful because it lists all these, and some of, like you said, some of the words that we wouldn't use in our day to day language, but it's important because it's more nuanced and as parents we can start introducing different words and
not just anxiety.
Chris McCurry: when, you know, the child says, I, you know, I'm too scared to go to school. The parent might say, huh, you know, so what's making you nervous to get, maybe get at, you know, well, we have a test today or. I'm worried that nobody's going to play with me at recess and you say, okay, well, maybe we can talk about that, come up with some strategies for handling that. But the book is called just in case sits with anxiety and Emma came up with the main [00:15:00] character's name, just in case, which was brilliant. It's on Amazon for preorder. Or you can order it directly from Jessica Kingsley Publishers.
Emma Waddington: and actually it's got, I think we first came up with the idea, uh, 12 years ago. I remember very well cause yes, cause it was when
Chris McCurry: Took that long to write it.
Emma Waddington: in to being human.
So knowing how to navigate it with
more skill, um, is really important, really helpful. And as parents, it's very difficult to see our child experiencing any emotion, but especially anxiety and not want to make it better. and so this [00:16:00] piece around accommodation, I think is really important on how
As parents can sometimes accommodate to our children's anxiety.
And and a little bit of accommodation is okay. And by accommodation, we mean trying to reduce their anxiety. So we might accommodate by driving them to school if they don't want to take the bus. Or you know, taking a different route Because they're scared of dogs. Right.
Chris McCurry: I mean, the two main ways that anxiety can present themselves behaviorally where things really become problematic is either avoidance of things that they need to engage in. Or trying to control things that really, you know, can't be controlled. And so they might say, you know, I don't want to go to school today, please don't let me go to school.
Which is a [00:17:00] both avoiding school and also trying to control the parent to get the parent to be okay with them not going to school. But you might, you know, kids might try to control peers on a playdate, because it makes them anxious. The uncertainty of knowing what we're going to play on the playdate is anxiety provoking.
So I've got the playdate planned exactly how it's going to go. And then when my buddy comes over and he doesn't want to do what I want to do, then, you know, my anxiety is even doubled or tripled. And so I try to control him and persuade him that, you know, we need to do it my way. So if your parent is recognizing.
You know, a lot of avoidance of things that the child needs to do. And again, you know, not everybody has to try out for the school play or go skydiving. But, you know, just certain typical age, typical, you know, necessary things kids need to do. We need to lean on them a little bit, you know, obviously give them strategies for being successful, [00:18:00] maybe even role play a little bit.
Okay, let's role play. Talking, you know, inviting another child at recess to play with you. If the worry is about nobody's going to play with me at recess. So we have to equip our kids with the tools to be able to manage these situations. And to encourage them to get out there and do that one of my favorite quotes is from a psychologist who was around in the fifties and he said, I can act my way into feeling better sooner than I can feel my way into acting better
and I really like that quote and it, you know it's when we talk about exposure therapy for phobias and things like that, you know, that's what we're talking about is like, Maybe not going off the high dive right away, but, you know, getting your toe in the water and then, you know, maybe up to your knees or whatever, but gradually getting out there and doing the things that you need to do.
And then lo and behold, [00:19:00] you know, 99 times out of a hundred, it's okay. Yeah, that worked out. I didn't die. I didn't get humiliated. Maybe I can try that again. But yeah, it's tough because our brains are just like three machines. They just crank out these stories about, you know, how terrible it's going to be.
And and we believe it because. It's our own brain telling us it's a trusted source.
Silence.
Emma Waddington: and for ourselves, I think having clarity as to why it's important to do, to have the sleepover or to, um, you know, go on the school bus. You know, having clarity of, of, you know,
Chris McCurry: All
Emma Waddington: we doing this?
helps us to have the willingness because anxiety feels deeply uncomfortable.
Um,
Chris McCurry: supposed to feel deeply
Emma Waddington: it's [00:20:00] supposed
Chris McCurry: I mean, if anxiety was pleasant, we would have died out as a species a long time ago. And for some people, you know, the jumping out of a perfectly good airplane is like a great experience that sort of like adrenaline rush for some people is is, you know, they pay good money to do that.
But I think for most of us, anxiety is an unpleasant. You know, emotion that we would like to avoid if at all possible. But I think you're right. I mean, orienting, you know, your child or ourselves to the bigger picture, to the valued goal that we're moving toward can give us, you know, that willingness to push on through and get to the goal, but that's tricky.
Silence.
Emma Waddington: [00:21:00] first, don't we really, we
need to. Really have the eye on the kind of world we want for our kid. And if what we want for them is greater independence, um, greater autonomy, then we have
Chris McCurry: Silence. Silence.
Emma Waddington: willing to feel our own feelings, our own worries in the service of giving them.
A life that has more autonomy.
Chris McCurry: Silence. Silence. And that's a great opportunity for the parent to model you know, not so much anxiety management, because we're not managing the anxiety per se, we're not trying to control it, because good luck with that, but managing our response to the anxious situation, so that would be the time for the parent to take an obvious deep breath, what I call coping out loud, to be able to say, whoa, you know, you're really anxious about going to school, I'm really anxious about you being anxious, I mean, let's [00:22:00] think about this for a second,
Look,
you know, school is really important and you got your friends and they're waiting for you.
And I know, you know, because we've talked about this, that five minutes after you're there, everything's fine. So let's head toward the door. But you're being, you know, compassionate and you're validating their emotion and you may be giving them a little nuanced vocabulary. While you're moving them in the direction of growth, but it is an opportunity for the parent to cope out loud and say, yeah, you know, this is really uncomfortable and we got things we need to do
Emma Waddington: Yeah. And what's the acronym? We have in the book, don't At the end to
help parents cope sober. Yeah. Where we help parents to really anchor in the moment. So talk us through that acronym. How do
The SOBER Technique for Parents
Emma Waddington: we
Chris McCurry: is SOBER, and it was developed by a [00:23:00] psychologist, Alan Marlatt, here at the University of Washington in Seattle. And the S, it's S O B E R, and the S stands for stop. So you're confronted with a challenging situation, you're feeling panicky, you're about to react as opposed to respond to the situation, so you stop.
Just for a second, the O is observe, observe what's going on, what's going on with my child right now, okay, he's really anxious, what's going on with me right now, I'm starting to get anxious, I'm starting to time travel, I'm starting to think how's he ever going to go off to university on his own if he can't like go to second grade. B is breathe, you take a deep breath. So you've already kind of stepped back a little bit by doing the observing thing, so you're getting a little distance from the emotions. They're still there, but you're a little, okay. You take that deep breath, it buys you a little time. And then the E is [00:24:00] expand. And the expand is there because when we get stressed out, we tend to do what I call the tube view.
we get this narrow focus, it's like, Oh my gosh, my child is really anxious right now. I'm really anxious. I want to just terminate both our anxious state. So I'm going to let him like stay home from school, which would feel great. That's what we call negative reinforcement because I've just reinforced both of our behaviors, his bleeding and my giving in.
That's probably not the wisest choice, but so when we expand, we get away from this tube view to say, okay, what's the bigger picture here? Okay, yes, we're all feeling anxious and we got to get this kid to school, you know, and so the R is respond. So we respond to the situation, you know, which is a little different from reacting.
It's a little more. Probably no less, you know, anxious, certainly, because [00:25:00] that's not going to go away anytime soon. It may not even be very calm. I think calm is overrated. And It's invalidating if you're too calm when you say, I understand you're upset, you know, it's like you have to be able to go, Whoa, I can see you're really anxious.
We've got to get to school, you know, so you put a little affect behind it and it, it lets the person know that you get it at a real, you know, visceral level. So you stop, you observe what's going on, you take that deep breath, you expand, or if things are getting too crazy and you're worried about him going off to university in like 12 years, you kind of kind of contract, you bring it in, but contract messes up the acronym, so I left it out.
And then you respond, and very often your first best response is some sort of validation where you know, play the child back and some, you know, meaningful while saying, I get it, you're feeling [00:26:00] X, you want to do Y, you need to do Z. You know, what are we gonna do? So the, you know, so then you do a little parental like keto, and you try to like move the child in the, you know, good direction.
And you know, and some days you just say, fine, we're not going to school today. You know, we'll just sit here and, you know, enjoy ourselves. And, but tomorrow we're going. But that's a tricky trap and tomorrow's gonna be another painful day. But, you know, I, I don't blame parents if they, you know, just cave because it's hard. Kids can be relentless.
Emma Waddington: I think, yeah, lots of compassion for parents who have to navigate these challenging
moments, but that's a brilliant acronym.
Um, and I know that we go through that. Really carefully in the book, um, because it is so important for parents to know how to regulate their own emotions because they will be [00:27:00] triggered, um, and feel quite distressed as we should do. We should feel distressed when our children feel distressed.
It's
Chris McCurry: Oh,
yeah, I mean, you know, good parents are going to resonate with how their child is feeling. It's part of I think what makes human connection possible. You mentioned before that some parents don't get anxious about their kids, but those aren't particularly good parents. In my opinion, but you know this does get to, you know, resilience and parent resilience and self care and all that sort of thing.
And I'm sure I've mentioned this before that my favorite definition of resilience is struggling well.
Emma Waddington: Yes.
Chris McCurry: goes back to the idea of, you know, this is a condition, you know this is part of the deal and struggling is part of family life. And [00:28:00] you know, I used to say if having problems as a family is a problem, you have a big problem. Because family life is full of problems, like, you know, almost every day there's a problem to be solved or a condition to be, you know, coped with,
Emma Waddington: That's
right. And it is exhausting and that's why having clarity on what's important helps. Like knowing, for example, that you know, we want our child to have an education, or we want them to have active social life, or we want to have you know, we want to pursue a career, or we want to, You develop, I don't know, run a marathon, whatever it might be, that we have clarity on those pieces that are really important will help us navigate some of this.
sort of stormy weather because in the moment it can be really difficult not to be reactive like you were saying and [00:29:00] be responsive like it takes a lot of skill to keep your eye on what truly matters in that moment and being a parent I remember you saying to me very early on in after I had graduated that it's not about being your kid's best friend.
Like
there are many moments as a parent that we have to make difficult decisions and that what we say and what we do may not make them happy
and may not be
Chris McCurry: It may infuriate them.
Emma Waddington: Yeah, fairly regularly. We get the I hate you.
hate you, oh gosh, I'm, yeah, in writing of late I've been getting it in writing just to make it more Well, my son used to say, you know, I'm going to be picking your nursing home.
God, that is quite dark,
Chris McCurry: It's chilling. Yeah. [00:30:00]
Emma Waddington: You go, I think it's, it is. I think it's important because of course we want our children to like us all the time. Um, ideally love us all the time. But that isn't, doesn't come with you know, the journey of a parent. The journey of the parent means that, you know, our child will dislike us.
And that may be the most important thing we need to do in the moment, even if they're really unhappy.
Chris McCurry: Yeah. But like you said, it's in the context of having clarity, you know, and if there's multiple parents, you know, parenting partners, whatever, to make sure that there's good communication around these things, like what is important to us as a family. What are sort of our bottom line expectations and values and how do we do that?
And again, you know, you wouldn't do this with a three year old, but with a 14 year old, you might have some discussion around this and say, okay, how are we going to [00:31:00] do this? You want to do X. I need you to do why, you know, let's negotiate and that's an important life skill and an opportunity to model communication and to help the child develop some skills around give and take and you know, compromising and you know, keeping an eye on, you know the valued goals at the same time and not just reacting to what would feel good in the moment. To help them navigate their anxiety, too. Like, if I think of our, just going back to the workbook
Emma Waddington: and how we can teach them certain language, the different words for anxiety, but also to recognize that anxiety is often stories. Stories that we have, be it as parents or be it our children, about a situation or ideas. And I really like that concept, the concept of an [00:32:00] idea and whether that idea is useful or not in the service of that bigger picture that we were just talking about. and I guess even as parents, this idea that our children need to like us all the time, how useful is that in the service of, you know, getting them to school or getting them to do chores, which is a big part of my day to day. You know, they don't want to do it and they're not particularly happy, but I think it's really important for them to learn about responsibility that doesn't go without a few battles.
Chris McCurry: No, of course not. But again, it's in the context of your value of saying by my children are going to learn, you know, responsibility and thoughtfulness and all that. You know, and they're going to do it through chores because [00:33:00] that's one of the best way to, you know, to contribute to the family, you know, all that sort of thing.
Yeah. It was, I didn't say that very well, Ashley, but you can clean that up. No doubt. Silence.
Emma Waddington: give
them a lot of anxiety.
Like you were saying, sitting tests, going to school,
peers having to go to, to, cause as they get older, their anxieties can be around their friendships And
Chris McCurry: it's tricky. And this is perhaps [00:34:00] another conversation. You know I, I remember the quote from the Swiss psychiatrist, Carl Young, who said the most important influence on the life of a child is the life his parent never led. So is it, is, are we pushing our child into, you know, football or the school play or getting their Eagle Scout thing because it's best for them or it's because it's like, you know, they're living out our fantasy or our ideas of what their life should be.
That's a whole nother topic, but it's it's just, you know, it's one of those tricky things about being a parent that you have to keep your eye on all of these. These stories and these ideas that we have and not to take them too seriously, particularly if they're not working out very well in the life of the family.
Emma Waddington: point. Such a good [00:35:00] point. Because we
are. in this environment what you said at the beginning that, you know, there's a lot of anxiety out there that our children need to be successful. You know, this overachievement culture you know, this toxic striving. And we're going to have a conversation about that on the podcast is a problem for us as parents and for our children that we fear that they're not going to have.
the success that they should have and they need to have, and that means that we can push them them in directions that maybe they don't need to go. And
that maybe anxiety is coming from their inability to do the things as opposed to their fear about doing things. Like sometimes I wonder, If, you know, as parents, when our children is, uh, anxious, it's because they don't have the coping skills that they need, or it's not, you know, appropriate for them. I do think our expectations are going up [00:36:00] of our
children. I
remember
Chris McCurry: Absolutely.
Emma Waddington: talking about that with Debbie Sorenson that, you know, when I hear parents taking their three year olds to five sessions of football a week, and then they wonder why the kid is feeling overwhelmed, I'm thinking, because they're going to football five times a week.
Why would you do that to yourself, let alone to your child?
Chris McCurry: Silence.
Emma Waddington: we've, we have to. Be constantly on the lookout for our expectations of ourselves and our children, because those have skyrocketed,
Chris McCurry: Silence.
Emma Waddington: And
Chris McCurry: We need to take a step back.
Emma Waddington: Yeah, I think so too, and that's not anxiety per se, that might just be the developmentally it's not appropriate.
Chris McCurry: Right
Or the, it doesn't match the child's temperament.
Emma Waddington: Yeah,
Chris McCurry: [00:37:00] Yeah,
Emma Waddington: too seriously, our ideas too seriously, keeping an eye on how things are really working
Chris McCurry: Yeah. To be curious, to, you know, to say, huh, I, I wonder if that's true, you know how can I find out, you know, and, you know, we usually find out By engaging rather than, you know, trying to figure it out ahead of time, you know, I could act my way into feeling better sooner that I can feel or think my way into acting better.
Emma Waddington: right.
Really
helpful. So I think, yeah, I think we've done a brilliant job of, may I say.[00:38:00]
Chris McCurry: Yes, please.
Emma Waddington: Yeah, of talking about parental anxiety and childhood anxiety and obviously I, I've learned so much about this from
you, um, Chris, and your years of experience, and I've really enjoyed. Writing the workbook just in case sets with anxiety.
Um,
Chris McCurry: And the two more that are coming out,
Emma Waddington: oh yes,
Chris McCurry: one on sadness and one on anger, which will be coming out in May and July, respectively. So we'll have all that in the show notes.
Emma Waddington: yes. brilliant. And I guess yeah, cause anxiety sometimes can show up as anger. We can get, you know,
quite angry.
Chris McCurry: oppositional behavior, you know because, you know, child doesn't, you know, it's fight or flight. So, you know, they're going to fight you on going to school or they're going to like run off and hide under the bed or whatever. But yeah, it can show up as attention concentration problems [00:39:00] because they're in their head worrying about something and they're not paying attention to you or the teacher or whatever.
There's a lot of what we call comorbidity between ADHD and anxiety because they all come from basically the same part of the brain, which is central to attention allocation. So yeah there's a lot of ways anxiety can present itself. So looking at, you know, the child's behavior patterns and how much. Fight or flight or control or avoidance is going on and how much is that impacting the child's development and having a good life.
Emma Waddington: Yeah. And our own.
Chris McCurry: Right. And our own.
Emma Waddington: Yeah. Cause
As parents it will influence us immensely. Wonderful.
Any parting
Final Thoughts on Anxiety and Parenting
Emma Waddington: final thoughts? This is my turn to say it.
Chris McCurry: Just keep breathing. You know, it's anxiety is a fact [00:40:00] of life and it's a fact of Many important situations. If we're living, you know, an interesting life and it needn't get in the way if we can handle it well and keep our eye on the prize,
Emma Waddington: Beautiful.
So
true. It needn't be the boss of us. Love that.
Chris McCurry: all right, well, thank you, Emma. This was a lot of fun.
Emma Waddington: really was. It really was.
