Many times when children react with strong behaviors or tantrums, yelling, kicking, pulling out hair, or biting, there is an underlying factor that has instigated the behavior. Of course, there are times when a child is having a flat-out, good ol’ tantrum. But there are other times when fear, insecurity, or anxiety is the culprit. The hard part is that many of our children are not even aware of what they are experiencing, and by children I mean up into the middle school and even high school years. The most commonly used words to describe emotions from early on are sad, happy, and mad. For many of our children, they only use those emotions to describe their emotional state for years to come. Already a problem arises, as children often feel so many emotions greater than those three words and they have no way to identify the emotion or express it.
Beginning to work on dealing with anxieties is first learning about what it means. As we learn through one of our children’s activity books “Keeping Calm,” by Kim Gallo and Julie Anneberg, sometimes things scare us, make us worry or mad, and in those moments we get anxious and we freak out. Children then get to work through the stories of friends, like the monkey Zeebu, when they are freaking out, and then your child gets to help Zeebu and his friends make choices of how to get calm. Once an idea is introduced and identified, the next step is to be able to identify the anxiety in your own life. This is a good time where parents can help a therapist by identifying a specific time in the week where there was a breakdown or a tantrum. Since our kids are not equipped to identify anxiety on their own, they have a hard time identifying or remembering moments when their emotions were running a little higher than expected. Because they cannot identify it, they are unaware of it.
Dr. Tony Attwood has also created a program for children and adolescents to help work through and mange anxiety. He first begins with identifying and noticing what makes the child calm, happy, content, and feeling safe. Afterwards the exploration begins on what kinds of things bring out opposite feelings, such as anxiety, worry, and fright. Some items may be being teased, thunderstorms, looking stupid, parents arguing, or hospitals. The children then have a chance to rate situations on a scale 1 – 10, identify poisonous thoughts (I’m not good at homework) and antidote thoughts (I will be better next time), and create a tool box of calm down strategies.
Children learn as they get older that everyone experiences high states of emotions and even anxiety at times. Who hasn’t felt some level of anxiety when taking that final, getting pulled over for speeding, introducing your significant other to your parents, or presenting in front a room full of people? Everyone has their own story but it is important to teach our children to work through their story and understand that they can have some sort of control. Our children’s difficulties arise when they are overcome by their emotions and have for tools on calming down to make life seem okay again.
By: Tatiana Gorsky, MS, ORT/L
