Seeing your teen deal with intense anxiety and worry is stressful as a parent. While professional treatment is crucial, you also play a key role in providing emotional support and stability at home. How can you help an anxious adolescent? Below are just seven ideas that might help you help them.
Listen Without Minimizing
Don’t downplay their concerns, but let them vent freely. Validate their feelings and reassure them. Check in often. If they shut down, re-engage them to keep lines of communication open.
Help Identify Triggers
Work together to discern situations that spark anxiety like school, socializing or family conflict. Seomates as outsiders, we can see triggers before the people impacted by them can. Once you understand their triggers, help them to see/recognize what they are. Then, brainstorm solutions like improving time management or adopting relaxing night routines.
Encourage Outside Support
Though they may be hesitant, gently push them to see a therapist and psychiatrist. Treatment like CBT, medication and breathing techniques makes anxiety more manageable. Offer to participate.
Model Healthy Coping
Demonstrate smart stress relief like exercise, time outs and therapy for your own anxieties. When you do this, it’s like giving them a permission slip – they feel more comfortable trying the exercises for themselves because they see how it can help them in real time.
Support Treatment Plans
This could mean helping them remember to take any prescribed medications and get refills on time. Or it could mean using therapy techniques at home like cognitive restructuring and exposure exercises to reinforce skills.
Spot Early Warning Signs
Take notice of emotional and behavioral changes like restlessness, irritability, avoidance of school or friends. Check in with compassion if you sense your teen’s anxiety worsening.
Make Time to Connect
Spend quality time doing shared activities you both enjoy. Laugh together often! Strong family bonds help counteract isolation and loneliness.
Though professional help is essential in some cases, providing a secure, stable environment also empowers anxious teens. With compassion, patience and consistency, you can help guide them toward healthier ways of coping.
Hammond Psychology and Associates is the go-to resource for residents seeking psychological evaluations from a licensed psychologist in the Tampa Bay area. Click here to learn more about our Psychological Testing services in our Brandon location.