Your daughter has a major test on Monday. You’ve watched her spending hours on social media with her friends over the weekend but reality hits on Sunday night and she comes to you in tears, saying ‘I’m so stressed!’
What do you do?
Or: your daughter has a bad bout of flu and starts waking up a lot in the night. While she is ill, you sometimes bring her into your bed. After two weeks she is fully recovered but now she gets very distressed at bedtime because she doesn’t want to sleep on her own.
What do you do?
Or: your daughter is feeling nervous about the first day of the new school year. She worries constantly that she won’t be able to cope and starts to say that she doesn’t want to go. On the first day, you finally get her into the car but before you get going she has a panic attack – struggling to breathe, heart racing, sweating and complaining of nausea.
What do you do?
A few weeks ago, I attended the Alliance of Girls’ Schools Australasia (AGSA) 2021 Summit which featured a number of excellent speakers. One of them was Lisa Damour, an American psychologist and author of a number of bestselling books dealing particularly with adolescent girls. Dr Damour had a few interesting points to make about anxiety – the common thread to these scenarios.
She argued forcefully that we have accepted a thoroughly unhelpful definition of ‘wellbeing’ as the absence of stress or anxiety. In the first scenario, however, anxiety is perfectly appropriate. She hasn’t done the work and now she’s going to do badly. Feeling some sort of anxiety or dread about the unpleasant outcome is a proper response for a sensible and rational (if undisciplined) person. In fact, it is fundamentally protective:
The most important thing to know about anxiety is that psychologists are fine with it most of the time. We have always considered anxiety to be a normal, healthy emotion. It is a fundamentally protective emotion. It is an experience we have, it is an alarm that rings, when something’s not right.
The parent in this scenario therefore should ask ‘Have you studied?’ and if the answer is no, then the appropriate response is: ‘Good! You’re having the right reaction.’ The girl now needs to focus and study what she can; she also needs to learn to avoid this scenario. Feeling relaxed and happy about the whole debacle is precisely what she doesn’t need.
Good mental health, Dr Damour argues, is ‘when you have the right feeling at the right time and you are able to manage it effectively’. As we all know, tension, stress, worry, sadness and anxiety can be the proper response to difficult circumstances, and adults often best help young people by helping them reframing these feelings as ‘the right feeling’ in response to that particular challenge – and therefore a sign of emotional maturity and mental strength.
Alarm bells should ring, however, if there is anxiety but nothing is wrong, or if the anxiety is out of all proportion to the source of the worry. A child who is very sick may well need attention during the night and it is normal to seek extra comfort or reassurance; but a healthy child is perfectly capable of sleeping in their own bed. If we treat anxiety as something to be avoided at all costs, then the child will never learn to sleep on her own – and we have inadvertently taught her that we share her belief that sleeping alone is both scary and beyond her capacity. There is an enormous body of evidence that shows that avoidance entrenches anxiety – and the longer the avoidance, the deeper it gets its claws in. In the short term, addressing the fears and coaxing the child through it will increase her distress and also require far more time and energy from the parents. But finding out that her worries are exaggerated is a lesson that sets her up for long-term success.
Sometimes, though, professional help is needed. Nervousness on the first day of school is normal and healthy but a full-blown panic attack may need professional advice. Often, that advice will include some form of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) and a process of incrementally confronting, rather than avoiding, the source of the anxiety.
When the child we love is in distress, it is instinctive to seek immediately to reduce the distress but that instinct can take unproductive forms: stepping in to pick up the pieces for them rather than helping them take responsibility; or focusing on soothing and distracting instead of sitting with them and calmly helping them identify the cause and reframe their response. If, however, we can focus their attention on the fact that this is ‘the right feeling at the right time’ and that we have faith in their capacity to manage those feelings, we will build their confidence, resilience and capacity to meet the inevitable challenges of life.
Further reading:
Teenagers, Anxiety Can Be Your Friend - The New York Times (nytimes.com)
How to Help Teenage Girls Reframe Anxiety and Strengthen Resilience | KQED
Parenting podcasts by Dr Damour:
Ask Lisa: The Psychology of Parenting on Apple Podcasts