Parents do not cause anxiety. I want to say that again. It’s impossible to cause your child to have anxiety. They have been born with the capacity to feel anxious and seek safety. Feeling anxious – keeps them safe. Seeking safety – keeps them emotionally connected to others and bonding well with you. Both of these instinctual responses are adaptive for them and completely normal!
Parents can respond to their child’s distress with their own distress, and keep their child’s anxiety in motion. It is your job to respond to distress cues as a parent. That is what has kept your child alive for all these years – way to go!
As a reminder, anxiety is the chronic and unnecessary triggering of the fight, flight or freeze response in the absence of threat. If there is chronic and unnecessary triggering of our support as parents and caregivers when it isn’t needed, we continue to hover and protect and move into overprotect – especially when a child can do the protecting himself for example, whilst on the playground with new friends. Parents don’t cause anxiety. Anxiety is there first as your child is born with core regulatory systems that need anxiety present to protect them.
In a Yale study a group of kids with diagnosed anxiety disorders received 12 weeks of 1 hour therapy once a week. In another group, only parents and no children were directly supported by a therapist. The study had the same outcomes for both groups. Relationships with parents and kids were stronger too.
We only need to change one part of the system for this to have a big impact. You don’t need to change your kid or teen. I know how hard this can be. I also know that it works. I have focused on the family dynamic as the place where the work needs to be done for many years now. Your kid doesn’t operate in isolation. It’s a whole dynamic thing! You are not the problem and you are a big part of the solution.
Breaking Free of Child Anxiety and OCD – Eli Lebowitz book.
