Category: Anxiety

Helping Your Anxious Teen: Positive Parenting Strategies to Help Your Teen Beat Anxiety, Stress, and Worry

By Sheila Achar Josephs, PhD  (2017)

From Amazon.com: ““… thoughtful tools for helping young people help themselves.”
—Library Journal

Parenting a teen isn’t easy, but parenting an anxious teen is especially challenging. Written by a psychologist and expert on adolescent anxiety, this essential book will show you what really works to overcome all types of teen anxiety and how to apply specific skills to support your teen.  
 
Most parents find it frustrating when common sense and logical methods such as reassurance don’t seem to work to allay their teen’s anxiety.  They want to know:  Why is anxiety so hard to get rid of once it takes hold?  Why aren’t my efforts to help working?  And how can I best help my teen break free from anxiety to become happy and resilient? 
 
This powerful book, based on cutting-edge research and cognitive behavioral strategies, will help you develop the know-how to effectively manage teen anxiety.  You’ll learn the best ways to support your teen in overcoming problematic thinking and fears, discover what behaviors and coping strategies unwittingly make anxiety worse, and understand how anxiety is best defeated with surprisingly counterintuitive methods.  Step-by-step guidance, along with numerous real-life examples and exercises, will help you to:

  • Sensitively redirect your teen’s worries when they intensify
  • Reduce social anxiety, perfectionism, and panic attacks
  • Proactively address common triggers of stress and anxiety
  • Implement a proven approach for decreasing avoidance and facing fears

From overcoming minor angst to defeating paralyzing fear, you and your teen will feel empowered by radically new ways of responding to anxiety. With Helping Your Anxious Teen, you’ll have a wealth of research-backed strategies to lead you in being an effective anxiety coach for your teen.”

Video for Kids: Why Do I Have Anxiety?!

At Parenting Survival for All Ages

January 24, 2018

This video is not intended to replace medical advice. This is for information purposes only. This video is for informational purposes only and should not be used to replace the guidance of a local mental health professional. Kids can’t fight anxiety until they understand anxiety. Parents often skip this step and wonder why their child’s anxiety never gets better. The best way to help kids with anxiety is to take the time to explain how anxiety works. So how do you explain anxiety to them in a way where they’ll not only get it, but be motivated to work on it? Have them watch my YouTube video made just for anxious kids to watch. In this short video I explain what anxiety is, why kids get it and how it works. Subscribe to my YouTube channel for new videos every week created just for kids with anxiety and OCD. *** Sign up for my e-mail newsletter at: http://madmimi.com/signups/188009/join Subscribe to my Podcast: The AT Parenting Survival Podcast https://www.anxioustoddlers.com/podcast/ For my online OCD class: Parenting Kids with OCD Http://anxioustoddlers.teachable.com/p/child-ocd For more support parenting a child with anxiety or OCD visit: http://www.anxioustoddlerstoTeens.com Sign up to get notified when my online Social Anxiety Class opens: http://bit.ly/Socialanxietysignup To join my private Facebook group visit: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ATpar… For AT Parenting online classes visit: http://anxioustoddlers.teachable.com For the AT Parenting Class: Teach Your Kids to Crush Anxiety: http://anxioustoddlers.teachable.com/… For my anxiety books visit: https://www.amazon.com/Natasha-Daniel… https://www.anxioustoddlers.com/paren… Other social places I hang out: http://www.facebook.com/anxioustoddlers http://www.pinterest.com/anxioustoddlers http://www.twitter.com/anxioustoddlers http://www.instagram.com/anxioustoddlers

CategoryPeople & Blogs

Keep Talking: Anxious Kids, Anxious Parents

Brattleboro Retreat

November 13, 2014

Research shows that children with anxious parents are up to seven times more likely than other children to develop anxiety. An untreated anxiety disorder in a child is one of the top predictors of depression in adolescence and early adulthood, but it is also the most successfully treated mental health challenge. In this episode of Keep Talking, treatment specialist Lynn Lyons, LICSW, shares with Gay Maxwell of the Brattleboro Retreat what families can do to externalize, manage, and liberate themselves from the tyranny of anxiety with results that include new problem solving skills and greater self-confidence when facing uncertainty.

Category

Education

Anxious Kids, Anxious Parents: 7 Ways to Stop the Worry Cycle and Raise Courageous and Independent Children

By Reid Wilson & Lynn Lyons, LICSW. (2013)

From Amazon.com: “With anxiety at epidemic levels among our children, Anxious Kids, Anxious Parents offers a contrarian yet effective approach to help children and teens push through their fears, worries, and phobias to ultimately become more resilient, independent, and happy.

How do you manage a child who gets stomachaches every school morning, who refuses after-school activities, or who is trapped in the bathroom with compulsive washing? Children like these put a palpable strain on frustrated, helpless parents and teachers. And there is no escaping the problem: One in every five kids suffers from a diagnosable anxiety disorder.

Unfortunately, when parents or professionals offer help in traditional ways, they unknowingly reinforce a child’s worry and avoidance. From their success with hundreds of organizations, schools, and families, Reid Wilson, PhD, and Lynn Lyons, LICSW, share their unconventional approach of stepping into uncertainty in a way that is currently unfamiliar but infinitely successful. Using current research and contemporary examples, the book exposes the most common anxiety-enhancing patterns—including reassurance, accommodation, avoidance, and poor problem solving—and offers a concrete plan with 7 key principles that foster change. And, since new research reveals how anxious parents typically make for anxious children, the book offers exercises and techniques to change both the children’s and the parental patterns of thinking and behaving.

This book challenges our basic instincts about how to help fearful kids and will serve as the antidote for an anxious nation of kids and their parents.”

Anxious Little Pishy

By Brittany Joseph (Author), Christopher Joseph (Illustrator) (2018)

Age Range: 3 – 7 years

From Amazon.com: “Anxious Little Pishy is a beautifully illustrated, and genuine story about a small fish who suffers from anxiety early on in her childhood. Written with a delicate vocabulary for easy to understand reading, the story line is laid out in a simple yet informative context. Brittany Joseph writes this tale from a sincere and authentic point of view. Follow along as Little Pishy swims away from her anxiety.”

The Anxiety Toolkit: Strategies for Fine-Tuning Your Mind and Moving Past Your Stuck Points

By Alice Boyes Ph.D. (2015)

From Amazon.com: “Do you overthink before taking action? Are you prone to making negative predictions? Do you worry about the worst that could happen? Do you take negative feedback very hard? Are you self-critical? Does anything less than perfect performance feel like failure?

If any of these issues resonate with you, you’re probably suffering from some degree of anxiety, and you’re not alone. The good news: while reducing your anxiety level to zero isn’t possible or useful (anxiety can actually be helpful!), you can learn to successfully manage symptoms – such as excessive rumination, hesitation, fear of criticism and paralysing perfection. In The Anxiety Toolkit, Dr. Alice Boyes translates powerful, evidence-based tools used in therapy clinics into tips and tricks you can employ in everyday life. Whether you have an anxiety disorder, or are just anxiety-prone by nature, you’ll discover how anxiety works, strategies to help you cope with common anxiety ‘stuck’ points and a confidence that – anxious or not – you have all the tools you need to succeed in life and work.”

What to Do When You Worry Too Much: A Kid’s Guide to Overcoming Anxiety (What-to-Do Guides for Kids)

By Dawn Huebner (Author), Bonnie Matthews (Illustrator). (2005)

Age Range: 6 – 12 years; Grade Level: 1 – 7

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From Amazon.com: “A Gold NAPPA (National Parenting Publications Awards) winner

Did you know that worries are like tomatoes? No, you can’t eat them, but you can make them grow, simply by paying attention to them. If your worries have grown so big that they bother you almost every day, this book is for you. What to Do When You Worry Too Much guides children and parents through the cognitive-behavioral techniques most often used in the treatment of anxiety. Lively metaphors and humorous illustrations make the concepts and strategies easy to understand, while clear how-to steps and prompts to draw and write help children to master new skills related to reducing anxiety. This interactive self-help book is the complete resource for educating, motivating, and empowering kids to overcoming their overgrown worries. Engaging, encouraging, and easy to follow, this book educates, motivates, and empowers children to work towards change. Includes a note to parents by psychologist and author Dawn Huebner, PhD.

From the Note to Parents:

If you are the parent or caregiver of an anxious child, you know what it feels like to be held hostage. So does your child. Children who worry too much are held captive by their fears. They go to great lengths to avoid frightening situations, and ask the same anxiety-based questions over and over again. Yet the answers give them virtually no relief. Parents and caregivers find themselves spending huge amounts of time reassuring, coaxing, accommodating, and doing whatever else they can think of to minimize their child’s distress.

But it doesn’t work. The anxiety remains in control. As you have undoubtedly discovered, simply telling an anxious child to stop worrying doesn’t help at all. Nor does applying adult logic, or allowing your child to avoid feared situations, or offering reassurance every time the fears are expressed.

This book is part of the Magination Press What-to-Do Guides for Kids® series and includes an “Introduction to Parents and Caregivers.” What-to-Guides for Kids® are interactive self-help books designed to guide 6–12 year olds and their parents through the cognitive-behavioral techniques most often used in the treatment of various psychological concerns. Engaging, encouraging, and easy to follow, these books educate, motivate, and empower children to work towards change.”

Coping Skills for Kids Workbook: Over 75 Coping Strategies to Help Kids Deal with Stress, Anxiety and Anger Workbook Edition

by Janine Halloran, MA, LMHC. (2018) From Amazon.com: “Dealing with stress, anxiety and anger are important skills to learn, but not all kids learn those strategies naturally. The Coping Skills for Kids Workbook can help teach children to calm down, balance their energy and emotions, and process challenging feelings. Author Janine Halloran, LMHC, share over 75 innovative, fun and engaging activities developed from her experience in schools, outpatient mental health clinics and as a mother.”