It Can Happen To Any Child
Back to school can mean back to stress for many young students, who quickly find themselves facing day-to-day challenges in a competitive academic setting. Rigorous standards are being placed on children at much younger ages than in previous generations – adding pressure and anxiety to the mix of feelings experienced by new students.
Some children experience fear of school because of these negative feelings, therefore hindering academic success. This can be terribly painful for a parent to witness. Thankfully, these anxieties can be overcome. In many cases, this fear will pass as the child becomes more experienced in the classroom setting. For others, there are steps that parents may take to reduce and/or eliminate the effects of school anxiety.
What do you do when your child suffers from school anxiety?
First of all, don’t panic or overreact. It is perfectly natural for kids to resist big changes, experience fear of separation, and be fearful of a demanding schedule of homework and exams. Most of the time this fear is not severe enough to require treatment, however, if the anxiety is having serious consequences, you may want to take action to relieve it.
Steps You Can Take
Parents and caregivers play a major role in helping any child overcome fears. There are many important things you can do to help:
- Be Supportive – Support and encouragement are crucial. Never discount your child’s fears. Dismissing their feelings makes children feel isolated, alone, and ashamed of their fears, which makes it even harder to overcome them. It can also lower their self-esteem, cause them to become withdrawn, and make it more difficult for them to express their feelings in the future. Instead, talk to your child. Provide gentle reassurance that their fear is unfounded.
- Treat the Symptoms – Sadly, reassurance alone is often not enough to soothe an anxious child, and so it is necessary for them to develop coping mechanisms for dealing with their anxiety. There are several techniques that may be effective in reducing and/or controlling anxiety. These include deep breathing exercises, relaxation techniques and coping statements.
- Breathing exercises can control the shallow, fast breathing that comes with anxiety. To teach your children breathing exercises, first have them put one hand on their chest and one hand on their abdomen, just below the stomach. Have them focus on breathing deeply, making sure that the abdomen moves when they inhale rather than the chest. Model slow, deep breaths for them and have them copy you. The deeper and longer they breathe, the more the symptoms of anxiety are relieved.
- Coping statements are special messages your children speak out loud that help them feel strong and confident, like saying, “I am brave, I am bold. I can do this.” Sometimes making a rhyme or even setting the words to music makes it easier to keep repeating them when they start to feel tense.
- Develop a Routine – Another way to help deal with a child’s anxiety is to produce a series of actions that will guide them through the part of the day in which their fear arises. A morning routine helps give a child a sense of stability and security. Try to follow it exactly the same way every day. Through repetition, your child grows accustom to this pattern of behavior, and follows it without much thought or effort. Over time, this causes desensitization: the fear weakens and becomes impotent.
- Seek Additional Treatment – If dealing with the fear becomes too much for you, do not feel shy about seeking outside help. Not being able to conquer your child’s fear does not make you a failure as a parent. But not getting your child the help he or she needs might.
Jason Edwards is the author of Will Allen and The Great Monster Detective, a book that he wrote for his own daughter who was suffering from anxiety.
