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No parent wishes anxiety and fear on a child, but dealing with anxiety appropriately is part of growing up. Too often, we see people suffering as adults because they never learned how to handle anxiety as a child. That’s why appropriate child anxiety treatment is crucial.

Kids have difficulty handling their emotions and frequently will act out their emotions. Exactly how it gets acted out varies from child to child. Under stress, one child might become aggressive while another becomes depressed and a third looks to their parents for approval.

As adults, everyone has to manage with some degree of anxiety. Learning to manage it successfully as part of the maturing process. If you think your child has behavior triggered by anxiety, part of your job as a parent is to coach them on how they can handle anxiety appropriately without acting out or suppressing their emotions. It’s an important job. Here’s a technique many parents find it useful.

Children experience emotions without being able to put a name on them. The word “anxiety” doesn’t have much meaning for them as an abstract idea. However, from infancy all kids become expert at identifying facial expressions and their probable emotional associations. Because of this, you can use pictures in a book or magazine to help young children become more expert at dealing with emotions.

For example, you can collect pictures of happy children, then sit with your child and ask questions such as “How do you think that boy feels?”, “Why do you think he’s feeling like that?” “What do you think he’s thinking?.”  You can also have fun with your child making up stories about what’s wonderful about the lives of the happy children in the pictures.

Next, you can look at pictures of children that appear anxious and ask questions about them. If you ask your child why the child in the picture looks worried it’s possible that they may answer with something they’re afraid of. Even if they don’t, you can ask a follow up question about what might help the child or how they could deal with their the problem causing the fear. You can use the discussion as a way to suggest possible solutions for your child to consider. Perhaps you could say something like “Well if I was that boy and I was worried about being left alone, I think I talk to mom and dad about it.”

Part of what you want to do with this exercise is both the children realize that it’s normal to experience a range of emotions in life and that there are helpful ways of dealing with them available to them.

You can find a lot of other ideas about helping kids with anxiety at Childhood Anxiety Disorder Help, which is a site dedicated to helping parents help their kids. You may also want to look at an excellent program called the Anxiety Free Child. With the help of their program, you can coach your child on how to reclaim their joy.