Are you or your teenager feeling anxious? What to do when telling your teen to breath, sleep, exercise, eat well and practice mindfulness doesn’t work.

Being the parent of a teenager who struggles with feeling anxious can be draining and stressful. Sleepless nights and difficulties getting out the door can lead to both parent and teenager feeling overwhelmed. Explosions of frustration and emotion are common and often lead to everyone feeling guilty and defeated. When telling your child to breath, sleep, exercise, eat well, and practice mindfulness doesn’t work, here are three other things you can try.

Double down on finding calm yourself. Emotions are contagious. Your child’s anxiety will make you feel anxious, but your calm can also help her to feel calmer. Breathing, sleep, exercise, eating well, and mindfulness are very useful in managing anxiety when we actually do them. Often parents are so focused on telling their children to do these things to manage their anxiety that they do not do it themselves. If you can find your inner calm, there will be less explosions and frustrations that generally make it more difficult for everyone to manage their anxiety and get out the door or go to sleep.
Practice Self-Compassion. Self-compassion sounds like some LA trendy self-focus psychological/hippie mumbo jumbo but it is becoming well recognised in science as a crucial part of parenting when things get tough. Put simply, self-compassion is the ability in difficult moments to be your own best friend. When things are difficult with your child it is common for the internal chatter to look something like this…. “I don’t know what to do anymore, nothing is working, maybe I’m not strict enough, she just needs to do it, why does she have to be so anxious, what did I do wrong, I can’t do this anymore!” In these moments, try taking a deep breath and saying to yourself, “Yes this is hard, it is hard for us both, I can slow down and think it through, I can do the next thing, I can make good decisions for my child.”
Learn how to challenge anxious thinking for yourself and then coach your child in how to do this also. Anxiety is caused by anxious thoughts. For example, a thought like “I am going to fail my exam no matter how much I study” will lead to a child being anxious about an exam. A parent who is thinking “Nothing I do ever helps my child” will likely be feeling anxious and defeated. Learning how to look at the evidence for our thoughts and then changing them to more realistic thoughts is a key skill to turning anxiety around.

For a free parenting workshop to find more calm and connection when parenting your teenager visit https://www.kirstinbarchia.com/calm-connection-free-workshop-register