Supporting Your Anxious Teen
Parenting an adolescent comes with a unique set of challenges. Many of the pressures that teens are dealing with today are new. Social media and the competitiveness of college acceptance, along with the lasting effects of the pandemic, all contribute to the pressures facing adolescents. Add on additional struggles with general anxiety, OCD, social anxiety, testing anxiety, and parenting can feel overwhelming. Below are some suggestions to help guide you through this stage:
Validation is key: Validating someone’s emotions helps them feel understood, heard, respected, and cared for. Validation of emotions does not necessarily mean accepting behaviors. Validating others means taking the time to understand their perspectives, to see why they may be anxious in a certain situation, and to make them feel that their experience is legitimate.
An example might be the following: your child has a school presentation. She’s highly anxious about talking in front of the class, and instead of giving the presentation, skips class. In this situation, it is possible to understand and validate the anxiety behind the behavior of avoiding the anxiety-provoking situation, while still not approving of skipping class.
Some tips for validating:
All emotions are valid - take the time to understand the situation and you’ll find that the emotions make sense
Not all behaviors are acceptable - it’s possible to understand why someone acted a certain way without saying that you approve of the behavior
Use “and” in place of “but” - if you validate the emotion and then say “but you should’ve handled it differently”, you have invalidated what you said prior to the “but statement”
Hold boundaries with compassion: Anxiety is a large driver of avoidance behavior. The cycle of anxiety is that there is an anxiety-provoking situation -> anxiety -> avoiding the anxiety-provoking situation -> reduction in anxiety -> learning that avoidance works to reduce anxiety. The cycle is hard to interrupt - and this is where exposures come in.
Exposures help teach us that we can handle the anxiety-provoking situations and get through them, thus decreasing our avoidance behaviors. Oftentimes, therapists talk about “accommodation” from the family and environment. Accommodation can look like letting your child avoid certain situations in order to ease their anxiety. As a parent, it is extremely difficult to watch your child be uncomfortable and upset. It’s natural to want to help them by removing distressing situations. Unfortunately, that only increases the anxiety.
In order to best support your teen in the long-run, it is helpful to maintain the boundary that you’ve set, while still being validating and compassionate about your teen’s emotional experience. For example, let’s say you ordered dinner to pick up at a restaurant and your teen does not want to go in and pick up the order by themselves. Rather than letting your teen sit in the car while you go in, it’s helpful to hold your teen to the expectation that they do go in to pick up the order while still being understanding of how anxiety-provoking the situation is.
Using and modeling ways to manage your own anxiety: Given the natural inclination to want to protect your child from being upset, it is often easy to find yourself feeling anxious when your child is anxious. Managing your own emotions is helpful to ensure that you are not reacting out of a place of anxiety when addressing issues that are coming up with your teen. Not only does managing your own anxiety increase your capacity to parent from a place of calm thoughtfulness, but it also can be a great way to model using skills to cope with anxious thoughts. Decades of research in social learning theory has shown that we learn through observing others. Modeling appropriate use of various coping skills can help to reinforce your teen using them, as well as normalize anxiety and create an open dialogue in the family around mental health.
Overall, parenting an adolescent, particularly when your teen is dealing with anxiety, is challenging! Each family’s situation is different. It will take some trial-and-error and practice to understand how to best support your child. Keeping an openness in communication and asking your teen how to best support them will help to foster a strong attachment between parent and child.
Therapy for Anxious Teens at Austin Anxiety and OCD Specialists
We hope that our blog will be a helpful resource for parents of anxious teens! We also acknowledge that additional support from a licensed mental health professional (i.e., psychologist, psychiatrist, counselor, or therapist) is sometimes necessary. Parenting is tough and we are here for you! Austin Anxiety and OCD Specialists is committed to serving teens who are struggling with stress, anxiety and OCD. We are also dedicated to providing support for parents. We serve children, teenagers, and adults living in Austin, Westlake, Round Rock, Cedar Park, Liberty Hill, Leander, Georgetown, Pflugerville, Buda, Kyle, and the surrounding areas for in-person therapy sessions at our three Austin area offices. We also provide teletherapy (virtual video therapy sessions) for children and teens living throughout the state of Texas. If you are interested in scheduling an appointment or learning more about evidence-based therapy for anxiety or OCD please reach out to us at hello@austinanxiety.com or 512-246-7225.