As I was reading the newspaper this morning there was an article on Rising Anxiety and Depression in schools.

In the 25 years I have owned ATLANTIC GYMNASTICS I have seen tens of thousands of children come through the doors. The past few years I have noticed increased anxiety levels in the children. 

Current issues in society are really having an effect on the anxiety our children are feeling. Within the first few days of school our children will practice an ACTIVE SHOOTER DRILL. Never before have our children been faced with such stress.

There are things that we as parents can do to help them with anxiety. 

Get Back to Basics

Your anxious child doesn’t need to play every sport and attend every party.  They do need to slow down and focus on  basic health needs:

• Getting a good nights sleep
• Healthy meals
• Plenty of water
• Outdoor free play (without a parent hovering over them)
• Daily exercise (of course I will recommend gymnastics but think riding bikes, playing at the park, etc.) 
• Downtime to decompress

We need to be careful that we are not passing on our anxiety to them. Kids look to their parents for information about how to interpret new or ambiguous situations; if a parent seems consistently anxious and fearful, the child will determine that a variety of scenarios are unsafe. As parents we need to help our children face new and uncomfortable situations without freaking them out. They need to know there are acceptable risks in the world. 

Gymnastics is all about acceptable risks. Getting out of your comfort zone, accepting and overcoming challenges. I have seen many children come into the gym afraid to leave their parents side. Afraid to join the class. Slowly they learn to explore on their own. To figure out how their body feels upside down and in the air. They begin to understand that the anxiety they feel is just their body and mind letting them know that something new is going on. It’s not bad or good. It’s just NEW. Through small, progressive steps the children begin to gain confidence and build resilience. 

Some helpful tips from Child Mind Institute. 

1. The goal isn’t to eliminate anxiety, but to help a child manage it.

None of us wants to see a child unhappy, but the best way to help kids overcome anxiety isn’t to try to remove stressors that trigger it. It’s to help them learn to tolerate their anxiety and function as well as they can, even when they’re anxious. And as a byproduct of that, the anxiety will decrease or fall away over time.

2. Don’t avoid things just because they make a child anxious.

Helping children avoid the things they are afraid of will make them feel better in the short term, but it reinforces the anxiety over the long run. If a child in an uncomfortable situation gets upset, starts to cry—not to be manipulative, but just because that’s how she feels—and her parents whisk her away, or remove the thing she’s afraid of, she’s learned that coping mechanism, and that cycle has the potential to repeat itself.

3. Express positive—but realistic—expectations.

You can’t promise a child that his fears are unrealistic—that he won’t fail a test, that he’ll have fun ice skating, or that another child won’t laugh at him during show & tell. But you can express confidence that he’s going to be okay, he will be able to manage it, and that, as he faces his fears, the anxiety level will drop over time. This gives him confidence that your expectations are realistic, and that you’re not going to ask him to do something he can’t handle.

4. Respect her feelings, but don’t empower them.

It’s important to understand that validation doesn’t always mean agreement. So if a child is terrified about going to the doctor because she’s due for a shot, you don’t want to belittle her fears, but you also don’t want to amplify them.You want to listen and be empathetic, help her understand what she’s anxious about, and encourage her to feel that she can face her fears. The message you want to send is, “I know you’re scared, and that’s okay, and I’m here, and I’m going to help you get through this.”

5. Don’t ask leading questions.

Encourage your child to talk about his feelings, but try not to ask leading questions— “Are you anxious about the big test? Are you worried about the science fair?” To avoid feeding the cycle of anxiety, just ask open-ended questions: “How are you feeling about the science fair?”

6. Don’t reinforce the child’s fears.

You don’t want to say with your tone of voice or body language: “Maybe this is something that you should be afraid of.” Let’s say a child has had a negative experience with a dog. Next time she’s around a dog, you might be anxious about how she will respond, and you might unintentionally send a message that she should, indeed, be worried.

7. Encourage the child to tolerate her anxiety.

Let your child know that you appreciate the work it takes to tolerate anxiety in order to do what he wants or needs to do. It’s really encouraging him to engage in life and to let the anxiety take its natural curve. We call it the “habituation curve”—it will drop over time as he continues to have contact with the stressor. It might not drop to zero, it might not drop as quickly as you would like, but that’s how we get over our fears.

8. Try to keep the anticipatory period short.

When we’re afraid of something, the hardest time is really before we do it. So another rule of thumb for parents is to really try to eliminate or reduce the anticipatory period. If a child is nervous about going to a doctor’s appointment, you don’t want to launch into a discussion about it two hours before you go; that’s likely to get your child more keyed up. So just try to shorten that period to a minimum.

9. Think things through with the child.

Sometimes it helps to talk through what would happen if a child’s fear came true—how would she handle it? A child who’s anxious about separating from her parents might worry about what would happen if they didn’t come to pick her up. So we talk about that. If your mom doesn’t come at the end of soccer practice, what would you do? “Well I would tell the coach my mom’s not here.” And what do you think the coach would do? “Well he would call my mom. Or he would wait with me.” A child who’s afraid that a stranger might be sent to pick her up can have a code word from her parents that anyone they sent would know. For some kids, having a plan can reduce the uncertainty in a healthy, effective way.

10. Try to model healthy ways of handling anxiety.

There are multiple ways you can help kids handle anxiety by letting them see how you cope with anxiety yourself. Kids are perceptive, and they’re going to take it in if you keep complaining on the phone to a friend that you can’t handle the stress or the anxiety. I’m not saying to pretend that you don’t have stress and anxiety, but let kids hear or see you managing it calmly, tolerating it, feeling good about getting through it.

When we see children walk into the gym for the first time, EVERYTHING is NEW and UNCOMFORTABLE. But it is also FUN and EXCITING. Children in the gym learn to overcome their fears. They learn that NEW and UNCOMFORTABLE can turn into FUN and EXCITING. These are lessons that can follow them in life. 

In the gym children learn to persevere, to trust that they can overcome their natural anxiety. They may end up really loving something that was initially scary and uncomfortable. As a gymnast, when I was feeling super stressed and anxious over a new skill or a performance, I came to understand that this was just my body and mind saying. “Hey something important is going on here, pay attention”. As an adult, that feeling is just part of my everyday routine, whether I am TEACHING a new skill or getting up to speak in front of a room full of people.