Supporting children's ability to cope with anxiety.
Childhood can be filled with an array of worries, like separation anxiety, friendship problems, phobias, body image, and so many more. This article aims to provide parents with a new framework for supporting our children's anxiety issues by utilizing and understanding Siegel's (2010) 'Window of Tolerance' and the impact of shame (Sanderson, 2015) in conjunction with coping strategies.
Although anxiety feels unpleasant, it is a natural alarm system designed to ignite our fight/flight/freeze stress response in order to survive. However, it can become overactive when harmless things trigger this stress response with false alarms, disrupting its normal functioning, creating unnecessary and overwhelming feelings. As parents, it is incredibly difficult to see our children in such distress; however, accommodating our child's fear to diminish their stress does not enable them to develop abilities to cope...