The first day of school can bring excitement, anticipation, and… a whole lot of feelings. New classrooms, new teachers, new peers, new routines—and for some children, all of that change can feel overwhelming.

Some anxiety around a new school year is completely normal. After all, anxiety is one of the ways our minds and bodies respond to uncertainty and change.

Sometimes anxiety looks like, “I’m nervous about school.” Other times, it looks like a stomachache, a meltdown, trouble sleeping, or suddenly refusing to get dressed.

Signs & Symptoms of Anxiety in Children

Every child experiences anxiety differently, but you may notice:

1. More frequent outbursts or meltdowns
2. Stomachaches or headaches
3. Changes in eating habits
4. Changes in sleep patterns
5. Avoidance of school, activities, or situations that feel overwhelming
6. Increased reassurance-seeking, such as repeatedly asking what will happen or whether everything will be okay
7. More clinginess or difficulty separating

This list is not exhaustive, and you know your child best. Children don’t always have the words to say, “I’m feeling anxious.” Sometimes, their behavior is how they communicate what they can’t quite put into words yet.

Rather than focusing only on stopping the behavior, it can be helpful to get curious about what the behavior might be telling you. Is your child worried about separating from you? Making friends? Keeping up academically? Finding their classroom? Sitting alone at lunch? Managing a noisy or overwhelming environment?

Sometimes a behavior that looks oppositional on the surface is a child’s way of saying, “This feels like too much for me.”

So, What Can You Do?

You don’t have to eliminate your child’s anxiety. In fact, trying to convince a worried child that there’s “nothing to worry about” doesn’t always help.

Instead, the goal is to help your child feel safe, understood, and supported as they learn that they can manage difficult feelings and new experiences.

1. Create a Schedule

A new routine can be a BIG adjustment. A visual schedule can help make the unknown feel a little more predictable.

Try including things like:

• Wake-up time
• Getting dressed
• Breakfast
• Leaving for school
• School
• Homework
• Dinner
• Something fun or relaxing
• Bedtime

For younger children, pictures can be especially helpful. And don’t forget to include something they can look forward to!

You might even practice the morning routine a few days before school starts. Familiarity can make the first morning feel a little less overwhelming.

2. Check In

If you notice a change in your child’s behavior, gently let them know that you’ve noticed.

Instead of immediately asking, “What’s wrong?” try making an observation:

You might say:

“I’ve noticed you’ve been crying in the mornings. What’s going through your mind?”

“You seem a little quieter when we talk about school. Is something on your mind?”

“I’ve noticed your stomach has been hurting in the mornings. Sometimes our bodies let us know when we’re worried about something. I wonder if there’s anything about school that’s been on your mind?”

Sometimes, less pressure = more communication. Your child may need a little time before they can identify or explain what they’re feeling.

3. Validate Before You Reassure

When children tell us they’re scared, our instinct is often to make the fear go away.

“You’ll be fine!”

“There’s nothing to worry about!”

“You’re going to love your new teacher!”

Those responses come from a loving place, but sometimes children need something else first: to know that we understand.

Try:

“It makes sense that you’re nervous. There are a lot of new things happening.”

Or:

“I can understand why not knowing anyone in your class feels scary.”

Validation doesn’t mean agreeing that something terrible will happen. It means communicating: “Your feelings make sense to me, and you don’t have to handle them alone.”

4. Practice What You Can

Anxiety often grows when children don’t know what to expect. When possible, turn some of those unknowns into experiences your child can practice.

Depending on your child’s age and situation, you might:

• Visit the school or playground beforehand
• Walk or drive the route to school
• Look at pictures of the teacher or classroom
• Practice packing the backpack
• Role-play saying goodbye in the morning
• Talk through what lunchtime or dismissal might look like
• Practice what your child can say if they need help

You can’t prepare for everything—and you don’t need to. The goal is simply to make some of the unfamiliar feel a little more familiar.

5. Communicate Confidence

Children often look to the adults they trust for clues about whether a situation is safe and manageable.

That doesn’t mean you have to hide your own feelings or pretend everything will be perfect. Instead, try to communicate both empathy and confidence:

“I know this feels hard, and I believe you can do hard things. We’ll figure it out together.”

It’s possible to take your child’s anxiety seriously without letting anxiety make every decision.

Avoiding something scary can bring immediate relief, but sometimes that relief makes the fear even stronger the next time. When appropriate, gently help children keep moving toward school and other important activities so they can discover, “I was scared—and I was able to do it.”

And Remember…

Your child’s anxiety doesn’t mean you’re doing something wrong—and it doesn’t mean they’re not ready for school.

Transitions are hard!

Your job isn’t to make every uncomfortable feeling disappear. It’s to help your child know:

“I see you. I hear you. We’re going to figure this out together.”

If anxiety is interfering with your child’s ability to attend school, sleep, eat, participate in activities, or enjoy their day-to-day life, consider reaching out for additional support. Your child’s teacher, school counselor, pediatrician, or a mental health professional can help you better understand what’s happening and think together about ways to support your child.

You know your child best. Trust your instincts, stay curious, and remember that behavior is communication.

-Posted by Marci Hameroff

Marci Hameroff, a therapist at Jonah Green and Associates, LLC, offers therapy for children, teens, families, and adults in North Bethesda, Maryland, serving clients in Montgomery County, DC, and the surrounding areas. 

The post Back-to-School Anxiety 🎒✨ Helping Your Child Feel Ready and Supported appeared first on Jonah Green and Associates.

How Come the Program is Focused on Parents?

Individual or group therapy for anxiety in children and adolescents can be highly effective. SPACE treatment offers an alternative approach, which a therapist can provide alongside child therapy or on its own.   

Has your child demonstrated resistance to treatment or to your attempts to help them decrease their avoidance behaviors? Do they melt down when you ask them to engage in an activity that they find anxiety-provoking? SPACE treatment places no demands on the child but focuses on ways that you, the caregiver, can help reduce your child’s anxiety by changing your behaviors. This approach does NOT presume that parents are the problem. It does, however, propose that parents can be an essential part of the solution! To better understand how parents may help, let’s look at the anxiety and accommodation cycle according to SPACE:

While anxiety is a healthy emotion that alerts people to danger, an anxiety disorder exists when anxiety is exaggerated.  When children face a real or perceived threat, their Fight or Flight, an automatic physiological reaction, is activated. Because young children cannot independently cope with dangers, they signal their caregivers that they are distressed. They may cry, yell, or tantrum to avoid the stressful situation. In response, parents and caregivers who pick up those stress signals soothe their children, which makes anxiety in children an interpersonal event. Here’s the good news: Changing how you respond to your child can help them overcome their anxiety. 

What Happens in SPACE?

SPACE treatment helps parents focus on two types of behavior changes:

1. Increasing support: You will learn to respond supportively to your anxious child by showing them acceptance and confidence in their ability to handle their feelings. Your SPACE treatment-trained clinician will help you to identify supportive statements that convey to your child that you understand that something is genuinely hard for them (even if it may appear irrational or exaggerated). You are confident they can handle the stress and cope with complicated feelings. 
2. Decreasing Accommodation: Accommodation refers to any action you may take (or not do) because of your child’s anxiety. If your child or adolescent displays fear, you can probably think of changes you have made in your behavior in response. Maybe you speak for your child when the waiter takes your order because your child feels nervous in social situations, Or perhaps you provide reassurance to your child only to find out they return with more (or the same) questions. You may not remember the last time you and your partner had a date night because your child is anxious about staying home with a babysitter. You are not alone if you recognize yourself in any of those examples. Research shows that parents’ accommodation to children’s anxiety is widespread. Unfortunately, while accommodations may offer short-term relief to both child and caregiver, it reinforces and exacerbates the tension and may disrupt family functioning. 

SPACE treatment aims to help you by breaking the cycle of anxiety. Increasing support and decreasing accommodations will help your child AVOID THEIR AVOIDANCE and learn how to self-regulate independently. Your SPACE treatment-trained clinician will help you to:

• Understand your child’ or adolescent’s anxiety and avoidance behaviors
• Identify your accommodation responses to your child’s or adolescent’s anxiety
• Choose behavioral targets to remove unhelpful accommodations 
• Write a supportive, clear letter to your child informing them of changes in your behaviors
• Make, implement, and troubleshoot a plan
• Provide you with tools for coping with your child’s reactions to your behavioral changes 
• Provide support and assess progress 

Who Can Benefit from SPACE?

SPACE can treat various anxiety disorders in children and adolescents, including Generalized Anxiety, Separation Anxiety, Social Anxiety, Selective Mutism, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, and Panic Disorder.

Does your child exhibit any of these behaviors:

• Clings to you and refuses to speak in social situations
• Is afraid to fall or stay asleep in their bed at night
• Asks the same question over and over again in an attempt to seek reassurance and certainty
• Exhibits irrational fears or repetitive behaviors
• Avoids certain places or situations 

Do you wish to:

• Help your child become more independent
• Help your child transition between activities more smoothly
• Reduce unhelpful, stressful rituals
• Expand your child’s and family’s activities and social engagements
• Reclaim your bedroom

If you have answered yes to any of the above, then SPACE treatment could help you break the anxiety cycle and regain control of your family life!

-Posted by Yasmin Meyers

The post WHAT ON EARTH IS SPACE (TREATMENT)? appeared first on Jonah Green and Associates.

Anxiety tends to follow a predictable pattern, called the Cycle of Anxiety, which includes the following steps:

1. First comes the FEELING of anxiety, which many people experience as several uncomfortable symptoms, including intrusive thoughts, fear, racing heart rate, butterflies in the stomach, or sweating.
2. Next comes AVOIDANCE. This behavior involves avoiding situations that bring about anxiety or, if the situation is unavoidable, distracting oneself from the feeling of anxiety.
3. Avoidance brings SHORT-TERM RELIEF from anxiety. Avoiding a situation and feeling less distressed reinforces the idea that one should avoid the problem or stimulus causing anxiety symptoms.
4. From here, anxiety GROWS BIGGER over time. Unfortunately, repeated avoidance usually leads to anxiety growing bigger, scarier, and increasingly challenging to conquer over time. From here, the cycle repeats.

Breaking the Anxiety Cycle

Thankfully, there are evidence-based methods of overcoming anxiety. Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) uses controlled exposure to fear-inducing thoughts and situations, which can lead to decreased anxiety symptoms over time. The following steps can serve as a roadmap for gaining control over your anxiety.

• Make a list of everything you can think of that gives you anxiety. For someone with social anxiety, this might include: going to a birthday party; conversing with people you don’t know very well; sitting with others at lunch; giving a class presentation; inviting one or more people to hang out; or attending a sleepover. Make a list as long and exhaustive as possible. Simply thinking about the things that give you anxiety and making a list is part of the exposure work!

• Now that you have a long list, rearrange the items from least anxiety-producing to most.

• Go through the list again and assign a value to each item between 0 and 100. (0=no anxiety at all. 100= the most fear you have experienced or can imagine.)

• From here, develop a plan to methodically work your way through the list, intentionally “showing up” to the situations you wrote down and tolerating the following anxiety. Intentional exposure to fearful situations is scary, but you get to decide the pace at which you will work. Start with the low numbers. If those seem too risky to start, chances are your list is too short, and you have not thought of enough lower-numbered items (e.g., 10–30 range). Keep adjusting the list until it feels like something you could see yourself working through.

• Begin your exposure work. While courageously approaching the situations you know have caused you anxiety, allow anxious thoughts and feelings to appear and resist the temptation to distract yourself or leave. Recognize that your thoughts and feelings are not dangerous but normal bodily reactions, which usually reduce naturally over time. Function in your discomfort zone and notice your achievements!

• Remember to be patient and kind to yourself. Every situation you show up for is a cause for celebration! Keep in mind that the goal is not to eradicate anxiety. It is to make it more tolerable and strengthen your ability to stay present for challenging situations rather than avoid them.

• Finally, remember that you are not alone. Share your goals and plan with friends, family, or a teacher who can help with planning, accountability, and affirmation of your progress. If your anxiety seems too big and powerful to conquer, consider working with a therapist, counselor, or other trained professional.

Posted by Chris Erb

The post Understanding and Combating Anxiety appeared first on Jonah Green and Associates.

However, when daily, non-fatal anxiety enters our lives, the brain amps up and responds with stress hormones similar to those present in times of real danger.  For those with anxiety disorders, this means that the body often feels the same in the face of tests and homework as it does when encountering mountain lions and death-defying cliffs. However, this is anxiety’s little trick, because we all know that while the SATs maybe be scary and overwhelming, they will not lead to imminent peril.

When anxiety strikes and the avoidance instinct kicks in, there are two choices; press forward in small, manageable ways to eventually your way through the stressor, or engage in total avoidance. The trick to managing anxiety is taking path number one, i.e., taking small, doable steps towards facing your fears.  This requires the troublesome task of trading short-term stress for long-term gain.  While option two works (avoidance) in the short term to ease tension, it has a quite a few drawbacks.  If we solely avoid, it will become harder and harder to face our fears, and we will get to a place where faith in ourselves to overcome anxiety becomes quite low.  Dips in self-confidence/self-esteem often follow because of we forget the feeling of pushing ourselves past what we think we are capable of.  The key is never doing it all at once, but rather breaking a task down into what feels like manageable steps and starting a bit at a time.

When it comes to using this strategy in parenting, it can be a tough sell.  Encouraging your kids to do a task they would rather not is hard.  Children really know how to make a great case for avoiding – they can talk, cry, negotiate, and tantrum their way out of many things.  While we do not have to pick every battle, if avoidance becomes a pattern, it may be important to figure out if there is an underlying anxiety that is leading to their evasion behaviors.  Help them get through a tough activity/situation by empathizing with their feelings, while still showing your confidence in their ability to try.   They are also not required to do an entire task all at once, but rather make small steps toward trying.  No one runs a marathon in one day, but the first step is getting off the couch.  Make sure they are armed with anxiety soothing techniques, such as deep breathing strategies, fidget toys, or a calming place to go if they need short breaks.  Positive self- talk, practicing the situation in advance, or identifying a supportive adult can be helpful as well.  Sometimes, simply asking what is making them worried, and making small accommodations to make the situation easier can be a useful way to reduce anxiety.  If avoidance continues to persist, it may to time seek professional help to address the situation.

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The American Test Anxieties Association (ATAA) asserts that the majority of students in the United States report that they are more stressed by tests and homework than by anything else.  This is quite a staggering statistic, isn’t it?  Test anxiety can lead to a variety of social and emotional symptoms, including school refusal, increased isolation, lower grades and test scores, negative thinking, difficulty concentrating, anger, and disappointment. As you can see, there are a lot of negative effects of test anxiety. Here’s the good news: test anxiety is treatable!

Here are three effective methods to help your child overcome this debilitating type of anxiety:

1. Relax before and during the test

When we get anxious, our breathing typically speeds up to signify danger.  A lot of the physical symptoms mentioned (e.g., sweaty palms, lightheadedness, rapid heartbeat) start to occur when we feel we are in danger.  Once our breathing slows down, a signal is sent to the brain and body saying that we are safe. At this point, other physical symptoms begin to subside.  During a test, your child might feel himself becoming tense or nervous. This might be because he feels like he is faced with a dangerous situation! When he feels tension building, he should take a quick relaxation break.  Here are a few simple relaxation ideas that you can practice with your child to get him accustomed to utilizing these skills when he is anxious:

• Take several deep breaths, exhaling slowly after each one. Visualize the tension draining from your body as you breathe out.
• Tense your muscles and hold for 5 seconds, then relax. Repeat 3 times.
• Think of a peaceful, quiet setting (e.g., the beach). Imagine yourself calm and relaxed in that setting.

2. Set realistic expectations

Part of your child’s anxiety might be stemming from unrealistic expectations. Help her set a realistic goal, based on past performance of homework and other study materials before she sits down to take her test. If she doesn’t get 100% on her test or exam, that’s okay! It’s important to help her uncouple her self-worth with her score on a test.

3. Engage in Positive Self-Talk

If your child has studied effectively, it is likely that his confidence will be shaken if he thinks negative thoughts such as “I don’t have a chance of passing this exam!” You can help your child adopt an upbeat but realistic attitude by helping him replace his irrational negative thoughts with positive self-statements and practicing them before he takes his test.  For example, “I prepared carefully for this test. If I do my best, I have a good chance of doing great!” A few other examples of positive self-talk are: “I can do this!” “I am smart and capable!”

While these methods can be practiced together with your child and yield positive results, the help from a mental health professional to tailor a specific approach might be beneficial since each child is unique, with his or her own set of needs.

The post How to Identify Test Anxiety and Help Your Child Cope appeared first on Jonah Green and Associates.