Welcome to Catherine Gruener’s Encouragement Parenting Tips for October! Each month, WU World Changer Catherine Gruener will share new tips that will encourage you to learn new, positive parenting techniques!
Encouragement Parenting Tips for October: Resiliency in Children
Anxiety disorders are the most frequent mental disorders in children and adolescents according to the National Institute of Health. Lots of factors go into children developing anxiety disorders from biology, family genetics, adverse childhood traumas, and life events, to parents who struggle with anxiety themselves and model anxious or avoidant behaviors as well as parenting styles of overprotection, coldness, authoritarianism, and parental rejection.
5 Signs of Anxiety in Children:
- Frequent headaches or stomach aches that are not medically based.
- A daily restlessness that seems to have started out of nowhere.
- Angry outbursts at home and emotional dis-regulation that lasts more than 3 days or that is cyclical.
- Seem tense and easily react to non-threatening situations.
- New onset or cyclical sleeping problems.
If your child shows signs of anxiety, please seek support and help from your local licensed mental health therapist. If you are in the state of Illinois, please see our resources through Gruener Consulting.
We may not have control over our genetics or biology, but we can control how we support our children in learning the skills that protect against anxiety.
5 Tips to Help Your Child Be Resilient:
Support and teach your child skills as they take risks.
- Do not do for your child what they can do. When we do for them instead of allowing them to do for themselves we not only rob them of the satisfaction and natural reward of feeling accomplished, we can unconsciously send the message that we don’t believe they can do it.
- Have faith in your child as they face as many challenges as possible in their daily lives. Remember that we want to send the message that we believe in them and teach them coping skills. Children who learn coping skills early in life have a leg up from other children who have not learned that they are capable of problem-solving their issues or handling difficulty. They will become more confident.
- It is important that children learn how to deal with disappointment and strengthen their ability to sustain, deal, and overcome uncomfortable or less pleasant feelings like frustration, loss, loneliness, and embarrassment. Resist the urge to fix the feeling or the problem for the child. Support their expressing and processing their feelings in healthy ways.
- Help your child problem solve without giving them your solution, and if they cannot think of a way to solve their problem, offer them 2 solutions to choose from. Guide them in being creative and coming up with ideas on how to solve their own problems. Support them in solving problems when they are calm, not when they are emotionally ridden. Be supportive when their choices do not work out. Ask them what else they can do, rather than tell them what they should do. When we tell our children what to do, we can make them dependent upon us and others.
- Model resiliency to your child.
Do you have any tips for building resiliency in your child that did not get mentioned above? Please share them with us in the comments section below!
See you back here this time next month for my encouragement parenting tips for November!
– Catherine
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Catherine Gruener, LCPC, NCC, DCC, PDTC. Catherine is a multi-certified and licensed clinical professional counselor, nationally and internationally known for her parent training programs. She is the owner of Gruener Consulting and the Chief Executive Officer of the Encouragement Parenting Division.
