My child has anxiety

What this looks like

They get stomach aches before school. They worry about whether you’ll come back when you go out for the evening. They ask the same question over and over: are you sure, what if, will you promise. You answer. The relief lasts ten minutes. The next worry arrives. You’ve explained that everything will be fine. You’ve shown them the evidence. You’ve held them while they cried. The anxiety isn’t decreasing. The anxiety is taking more of the day each week.

The reassurance you’ve been giving is the loop. Every reassurance trains the next worry.

What you’ve already tried

• Reassuring them, repeatedly
• Avoiding situations that trigger the anxiety
• Letting them sleep in your bed
• Anti-anxiety techniques: deep breathing, counting, naming feelings
• A children’s anxiety workbook
• A child therapist who talked to them about their feelings
• An SSRI prescribed by a child psychiatrist
• Telling them they’re being silly

The anxiety has expanded.

Is my child anxious or going through a stage?

Why reassuring made the anxiety worse

You very likely came up with anxiety yourself, and watching your child distressed activates everything you swore you’d protect them from. You may have grown up with a parent who dismissed your worries, and you’ve sworn to take your child’s worries seriously. Taking them seriously has come to mean answering them. You may have absorbed from current parenting culture that any distress in your child is a wound to soothe, and you’ve been responding to that fear rather than to the structure of the anxiety itself. You may have lived through your own childhood feeling unheard and decided your child would always be heard, and the listening has become reassurance that the worries are real.

Every reassurance produces brief relief in the child. The relief reinforces that asking-and-receiving was the strategy. The next anxiety arrives because the system has been trained: anxiety triggers a question, the question produces reassurance, reassurance produces relief. The next anxiety is on the way.

Avoiding the trigger does the same thing. Each avoidance gives relief. Each relief trains the next avoidance. The world the child can comfortably move in shrinks.

This is the same mechanism as adult anxiety. The intervention is the same in shape: change the parental response, the child’s anxiety has nothing to feed on.

For your own anxiety if it’s running alongside, see I have anxiety and I worry about everything .

You can’t reassure a child out of anxiety. The reassurance is what’s been making the next worry arrive.

How we work with it

In strategic therapy your child never has to come into the room. We work on what you say back when the question comes (the are-you-sure, the what-if, the will-you-promise) and on the avoidance requests you’ve been honoring. The reassurance loop has nothing to feed on once the answers stop arriving in the shape it needs, and the worry stops paying off.

Your child reorganizes because the loop they’ve been running stops being available.