How to Stop Being a Helicopter Parent and Overprotecting Your Anxious Child
As a parent, it’s natural to want to step in and protect your overly-anxious child but being a helicopter parent can actually make your child’s anxiety worse. Here’s how to respect your child’s feelings and empower them to take flight on their own — without hovering.
Between social media, bad news 24/7, pandemics and mass violence; it may seem like the world is a dangerous, anxiety-inducing place.
It’s natural to want to protect our child from dangers and even more natural to want to rescue a child from scary situations.
But by doing that, we can reinforce a child’s anxiety, preventing them from developing coping skills and making their anxiety worse.
Learn about common traps parents fall into while trying to help an anxious child and why they don’t work.
You’ll also learn positive ways to validate your child’s feelings while helping them cope with their anxiety.
1. What is overprotecting and why it doesn’t work
Parents who are overprotecting an anxious child try to ease their child’s anxiety but may end up reinforcing it by:
Engaging in your child’s ritual to delay or avoid something that fears them
Example: A long bedtime routine
Why it doesn’t work: While long routines can bring comfort, they can become something your child depends on instead of learning to manage their fears.
Reassuring your child that their fears are valid and should be avoided
Example: Agreeing with your child that going to the dentist is scary
Why it doesn’t work: Dwelling on the scariness of something can become reinforcing and take on a life of its own.
Changing routines to avoid triggering anxiety in your child
Example: Leaving through the garage to avoid the neighbor’s dog
Why it doesn’t work: Overprotecting an anxious child now increases the likelihood that your child will increasingly rely on your protection, without learning how to manage their fears.
2. Why telling your child to “stop being scared” doesn’t work
While it’s tempting to talk your child’s fear down, minimizing or making light of their feelings can backfire. The following responses will not help an anxious child:
Lecturing or being overly logical
Example: “But you knew you weren't invited. Why are you crying?”
Why it doesn’t work: Lecturing or being overly logical can send your anxious child the message that you don’t understand or accept their experience.
Telling your child how they should feel
Example: “It’s really not a big deal. You shouldn’t be worried about this.”
Why it doesn’t work: Telling your anxious child how they should feel instead sends a message that you don’t value their emotions or understand what they’re feeling. It can also increase shame.
Being overly positive
Example: “It’s going to be fine! You’re one of the smartest kids in class!”
Why it doesn’t work: Being overly positive without recognizing their struggles can send the message that you’re not taking your anxious child’s fears seriously.
Solving or fixing the problem
Example: “Don’t worry. We will buy you a new one.”
Why it doesn’t work: Rushing in to solve or fix the problem devalues suffering as something that’s easily resolved and sends the message that your anxious child can’t solve a problem on their own.
3. How to help an anxious child
The best way to help kids overcome anxiety isn’t to overprotect them, avoiding or removing stressors that trigger your child’s anxiety. Nor is it by minimizing or not relating to your child’s fears. It’s helping them learn how to tolerate their anxiety and function as well as they can, even when they feel anxious.
The goal isn’t to eliminate anxiety, but to teach ways to manage their response to anxiety. Try the following when helping your child cope:
Be positive but realistic
When talking with your child about their anxiety, respect and validate your anxious child’s feelings, but don’t empower those worries. While you can’t promise a child that their fears are unrealistic, you can show confidence that your child will be OK and that with time they will learn to manage their anxiety.
What to do: Use language like, “I know this is hard, but I know you can do it and we will help you.”
Why it works: This sends your anxious child the message that you understand how hard this change can be but you have confidence in them. You’re not going to ask your child to do something they can’t handle.
Show empathy without sharing fears
Respect their feelings, but don’t empower them. It’s important to understand that validation doesn’t always mean agreement. So if a child is terrified about going to the doctor, you don’t want to belittle those fears, but you also don’t want to amplify them.
What to do: Listen and be empathetic, help your child understand what they’re anxious about, and encourage them to feel that they can face their fear. Use calm body language and tone of voice.
Why it works: The message you want to send is, “I know you’re scared, and that’s okay, and I’m here, and I’m going to help you get through this.”
Don’t avoid things just because they make your child anxious
Helping children avoid the things they are afraid of will make them feel better in the short term, but reinforce their anxiety over the long run as the child never learns how to cope with anxiety triggering situations.
What to do: Let your child know that you appreciate the work it takes to tolerate anxiety in order to do what they want or need to do. It’s really encouraging them to engage in life and to let the anxiety take its natural curve.
Why it works: Reminding your child that their efforts to tolerate anxiety are being seen can provide the encouragement to continue trying.
Ask open-ended questions
While you want your child to talk about their feelings, try not to ask leading questions that encourage your child to think one way about it.
What to do: Instead of using leading questions like, “Are you worried about the science fair?” you should ask open-ended questions, such as, “How are you feeling about the science fair?”
Why it works: Asking open-ended questions allows your child to express themselves without feeding their anxiety.
Create a plan
Encourage your child to tolerate the anxiety, and talk through plans on how your child might handle a situation. Sometimes it helps to talk through what would happen if a child’s fear came true—how would they handle it?
What to do: Before your child is in a situation that makes them anxious, create a plan with your child on how they might handle their fear if it came true.
Why it works: For some kids, having a plan on how to manage a stressful situation can reduce uncertainty in a healthy, effective way.
Keep the waiting time short
When we’re afraid of something, the anticipation is often accompanied by more fear than the actual experience. And the longer we have to stew and sit with our feelings, the worse things get.
What to do: Try to reduce the waiting time before a stressful situation. If a child is nervous about going to a doctor, don’t start a discussion about it two hours before you go. Instead, keep the waiting period to a minimum.
Why it works: Cutting the waiting time for a stressful situation minimizes the time that worrying can flourish.
Model healthy ways of managing anxiety
Kids are perceptive, and they’re going to notice if you keep complaining on the phone to a friend that you can’t handle the stress or the anxiety.
What to do: Once you know how to manage your own stress or anxiety, you can help children learn those same skills. You don’t need to hide your anxiety. Instead, talk to kids about what you feel and how you cope with it.
Why it works: Talking about anxiety and modeling healthy ways of managing anxiety gives children permission to feel stress.
