Short Wave - Short Wave Presents: Life Kit Tips For Dealing With Anxious Kids

Episode Date: January 3, 2020

When is your kid just scared of the dark and when are they dealing with a larger anxiety disorder? On today's Short Wave, we're featuring our friends over at NPR's Life Kit. They'll teach you how to help a child with anxiety and how to reach them in stressful moments. This episode was adapted from an earlier Life Kit. To hear the full version, check out npr.org/lifekit.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, you, Maddie Safai here with this special episode. Today we're dropping a little something-something-something from our friends over at NPR's Life Kit. And listen, I know this isn't our usual deal. You come here for science facts and bad jokes, but today's episode is still packed with science about anxiety in kids, which is pretty near and dear to me because I don't know about you, but I had it growing up. And spoiler alert, I still have anxiety.

And mental health is so important to talk about. So I'm genuinely glad we have this episode for you all today. So today on the show, Life Kits Corey Turner and Anya Kamnitz give us tips for dealing with anxious kids. I want you to meet a little boy from central Illinois. At five, he loves to draw and wear capes and play with a wooden sword that his dad made. But by eight or nine, he also has this constant pit of. of the stomach feeling that something's about to go wrong. He's scared of storms and high places.

When he flies on an airplane, he can clearly feel it breaking in half and imagines what it would be like to get sucked out. Most of the time, nobody else can see all of this worry, and he doesn't talk about it because it's either normal and nobody talks about it, or it's not normal, and that's super embarrassing. Finally, after 40 years, he describes his fear to someone else, a doctor who very quickly gives a name to this shadow he's been living with all his life, anxiety. And this is a hard story for me to share, Anya, because it's my story.

This is me. And I'm sharing it because it's also a lot of other kids' stories right now. And this episode is all about how we grown-ups can help them. So they don't have to live quite so long in the shadows. Thank you for sharing, Corey. Thanks for listening. That was hard. I know, I know.

But I really respect it because, you know, childhood anxiety is a growing issue right now. It's one of the most important mental health issues out there. Researchers have found that one in five kids will experience anxiety that rises to a clinical level before adolescence. Now, most of that experts say won't last. No, but some will. without help. All right, so where are we going? So we are going to Dr. Danny Pine's office on the NIH campus.

It's in Building 15-K. I'm at the National Institutes of Health, north of Washington, D.C., and I'm here because in my research on childhood anxiety, nearly everyone I've spoken with has asked me the same question. You know, Danny Pine? People I really respect told me they really respect a guy named Danny Pine. Oh, yeah, Danny Pine would be a great person to talk to about that. Dr. Danny Pine is a child and adolescent psychiatrist at the National Institute of Mental Health,

and he's one of the world's top anxiety researchers. Well, so the main thing to know about anxiety is that it involves some level of perception about danger. So when somebody's anxious or afraid, they're concerned about harm. Harm that hasn't happened yet. And that's takeaway number one. Anxiety is fundamentally a fear of the future and all of its unpredictability. We're all born with some anxiety because we need it. Young children are naturally afraid of strangers.

That's an adaptive thing. They're afraid of separation. That's an adaptive thing. These fears have stuck because they've helped keep us safe. But full-blown anxiety happens when these hardwired fears get amplified. It's like somebody turned up the volume. And they last longer than they're supposed to. It's really when it goes into the one to two-month range.

That's where parents should really start thinking about it, worrying about it. Danny suggests your child's pediatrician is a great place to start. We should also say, Corey, that our understanding of why anxiety affects some kids but not others has really changed. And, you know, parents reach out to us and we heard this question, can I pass anxiety onto my kids? the answer is yes, it is somewhat genetic. But we also know that stressors in a child's environment are also really influential, triggers like poverty, bullying, violence in the neighborhood, racism. Or factors even closer to home, like abuse or a parent's addiction.

All of these can increase a child's risk of anxiety. Now, takeaway number two. Look for the signs of anxiety. We spoke with a colleague of Danny's Dr. Crystal Lewis. She's also a clinical researcher at NIH who provides therapy to anxious kids. We just look at the level of interference for the symptoms. We look at, yes, the avoidance behaviors, but are there things that the child really wants to do or needs to be doing? And they can't do those things.

And so if you feel you're hitting a wall in terms of trying to get the child to do those things, that might be another indicator that, hmm, potentially, you know, we should get some help. So Rachel, a mom in Belgrade, Montana, says her six-year-old son is avoiding something that for many children is their favorite part of the school day. He doesn't like recess. He just started kindergarten. Mom, I love school. I don't like recess. So unstructured time seems to be the worst. And it's not just recess. We have like a super cool splash park in our little town and he refuses.

And I'm not going to drag him. I'm not going to drag a crying kid out and stick him in the water. Like, that's not fun. We heard this kind of thing from so many parents, Corey. I mean, my child is terrified to do something that I know is not going to hurt him that I think that he might actually love. What do I do? So we're going to go step by step now through some strategies

that we hope will help all of you grownups out there and your children. Takeaway number three, before you do anything else, says Rosemary Trulio of Sesame Workshop, try to help your child relax. You're not going to be able to move forward until you get them to calm down. And I think that is just so important to know what you can do physically to reset their systems so that you could then have a conversation. Okay. So in that heightened moment, how do you break through? It's so important to learn these belly breathing techniques because that deep belly breathing cleansing breaths is a re-centering of your physical system. Anya, I feel like every episode we do, we end up circling back.

to that episode we did a while ago with Cookie Monster. Oh, my God. How can I forget? The power of belly breathing. Ready? Yeah. Hey. It's pretty good, huh? You didn't even try it again.

Ha! Okay, so let's see you managed to calm your child down. What's next? Takeaway number four, you need to validate your child's fear. So we heard from lots of parents who say they really struggle to know how to respond when their kids worry about really unlikely things. Especially if they're feeling. getting in the way of a busy daily routine or maybe a fun family outing.

Dr. Crystal Lewis offered some suggestions she gives to grown-ups who in the moment may feel stymie by what seems like a child's irrational fears. I know that you're feeling uncomfortable right now. I know these are scary feelings. You want to personify the anxiety and so you can almost say, you know, we know that this is our worry brain. And so using the language so the kids understand, okay, mom knows, dad knows that I'm feeling uncomfortable right now.

I'm feeling anxious. I have to admit, Anya, I actually used the worry brain line on my kids the other day. I said, oh, sorry, guys, that was my worry brain. I love it. I love it. Yeah, and here's another don't from Rosemary. If your child's afraid of something, say, like a tornado or a car crash, believe it or not, don't just tell them, oh, that's never going to happen. So no matter how irrational you think the fear is, you need to validate it and make sure your child feels heard.

Corey, this makes me think of that mom we heard from earlier, Rachel, the one whose son was terrible. terrified of the splash park? I mean, is it ever okay to just make your child do with a fear? This brings us back to Dr. Danny Pine and takeaway number five. One of the things that we've learned from watching kids over time and helping kids who are having problems with anxiety is that we've learned how important it is to face your fears. Okay, so this is a tough assignment for some parents because they know just how stressful it can be for their kids to do something that's new that they're worried about. But we heard the same thing from every single

expert. So here's Dr. Lewis. The more that you avoid or don't do certain things, it's almost implicitly teaching the child that there is a reason to be anxious or afraid. So it's important that children understand, you know, things are going to be difficult in life. Things are going to be scary. We can do them. And as I say, and I tell some of my patients, you can feel scared. That's okay. We're going to do it anyway. And that sets us up for takeaway number six. Help your child build a sense of control. This is Crystal's job, helping kids face their fears. It's called cognitive behavioral therapy.

And a big part of that is exposure therapy. And she is a big fan of baby steps. Yeah, so she shared the story of one eight-year-old girl who was so afraid of throwing up that she actually wasn't eating. And during flu season, she was too scared to go to school in case some of the other kids might throw up. Yeah, so how do you baby step your way through that? Just a little morning.

We're about to say the word vomit a lot. We did a lot of practice, which included buying vomit spray off Amazon and vomit-flavored jelly beans. We did a lot of practicing up to the point where we created fake vomit. Okay, okay, okay, I get the point. I get the point, seriously. All I need to know, Corey, is, did it work? Slowly, but yes. She got to the point where she was in school and one of the peers had vomited in the classroom. And she comes into a session and she was just like,

one vomit in my class and I ran to the corner of the classroom and she was just like, I didn't help, but I was there in the classroom, which really showed some growth. And so she was just very proud of the progress she was making. In the past, she would have ran out of the classroom to the council's office and then miss school for like the next week. So Dr. Lewis says that us parents, when our kids are making baby steps on this or really anything that's hard for them, you know, you use small, meaningful rewards along the way, like maybe picking what movie we watch on family movie night or maybe they get to stay up in extra 10 minutes.

And so, little by little, with these baby steps, your child starts building her confidence. Facing your fears is important, but kids don't have to do it all at once. I'm Corey Turner with NPR's Life Kit. And I'm Anya Kamenets.

Thanks to Shortwave for hosting us this episode. If you're looking for more great advice from how to invest your money to how to get a great workout, along with a lot more parenting tips, Subscribe to Life Kit wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Tuesday and Thursday.