How Parents Can Avoid Passing Their Own Fears onto their Children
As a parent or caregiver, you’re doing everything you can to help your children be happy, healthy, and well-adjusted members of their community. Along those lines, you might be worried that your children are inheriting your fears and worries. Today, we’re going to talk about how parents can avoid passing along their fears to their children.
First, we’ll explore how a parent’s fears can influence their child. Then, we’ll show how parents can avoid passing on fears to their children.
We’ll also talk more generally about the rate of fear and anxiety in children, and to what extent the pandemic might be impacting that.
Can a parent’s fears influence their child’s fears?
In short, yes! It’s very common for children’s fears to be influenced by close adults, like parents, older family members, and close family friends - even if they don’t consciously realize it. Children are very observant and learn through verbal and nonverbal cues from those around them. If you express, through your words or your body language, that you’re afraid, your child may be able to understand that.
It’s also important to realize that anxiety and fears in children emerge from a combination of experience and biology. A child is 4-6 times more likely to experience impairing anxiety disorder if they have a first-degree relative with an anxiety disorder than children without. If you, as a parent, experience a phobia or other anxiety disorder, chances are that your child will as well.
Research shows that we can reduce children’s anxiety by treating parental anxiety.
The COVID-19 pandemic hasn’t helped matters. Last year, Little Otter did a study of kids 2-12 years old and found 80% of the children were at increased risk for anxiety and depression. Almost 60% were at risk of problems in their social skills.
We also found that half of the parents screened positive for an anxiety disorder and a quarter for depression. While the stress of the pandemic had adversely impacted child and parent mental health, we found that parental anxiety mediated 30% of the impact of the pandemic on the child’s emotional health. Said differently, this means that parental anxiety compounded the emotional impact on kids. What this also means is that we can reduce children’s anxiety by treating parental anxiety!
Just to reiterate:
Seek help and support for your own anxiety as a parent.
Seek help for your child as early as possible if you see that they are experiencing impairing anxiety or fears.
How can parents avoid passing on their fears to their children?
There are actions parents like you can take to avoid passing on their fears, in addition to seeking support for your own anxieties, phobias, and fears.
Communicate Your Fears to Your Child
The best way to prevent children from inheriting a parent’s fears or phobias is for adults to acknowledge and evaluate their own fears. Try explaining to your child that you have a fear, and that you’ve learned ways to manage it. Be clear that sometimes a person’s fears can be larger than the actual danger. For example, if you’re afraid of flying, you might express that flying is safe and that when you fly together, they don’t need to feel afraid because you are not putting them in danger.
When communicating with your child about your own fears, be mindful of their age. Younger children will have a limited understanding of the distinction between “real” fears and the heightened phobic fears.
Stay Calm in the Face of Your Fears
Children can often sense a parent’s anxiety, so if possible, try to create a sense of peace or calm. Lean on other trusted adults to help you manage triggers, and enable your companion to help you when you’re afraid.
In addition, try to prepare yourself mentally for the situations you’re afraid of. Think about your triggers in advance; by being prepared about specifics, you can be prepared in your mind about how to manage the expected reaction. This can help you stay calm and collected.
Model Facing Your Fears
Keep in mind, you’re going to be modeling “facing your fear” for your child. Our goal in raising children is not to prevent them from experiencing anxiety, but rather giving them the tools to manage anxiety. Exposure to the feared thing or experience is the cornerstone of overcoming your phobia. We all learn to reduce our fears and anxieties by being exposed to them in manageable “doses.” You’ll also be modeling how you overcome fears.
How Little Otter helps parents and children with their fears
Little Otter is a pediatric practice for mental health. Just like a pediatrician who cares for your children’s physical health, Little Otter cares for all aspects of your children’s mental health and your family’s mental health and wellness.
The cornerstone of our care are our proprietary assessments and quarterly mental health check-ups for your children and your family. We can help you figure out “when to worry” and what to do based on our assessments.
From this foundation, we provide personalized care plans and an integrated care team to support healthy emotional development and treat emerging emotional and behavioral challenges.
With an initial proprietary science-based assessment, a personalized child and family care plan, integrated measurement-based care, and quarterly mental health check-ups for your kids and your family, we are your mental health expert, your partner, and your cheerleader!
Learn more and register for Little Otter today!
