Accommodating Your Teen’s Anxiety Makes It Worse

As a loving, empathetic parent, it is hard to watch our teens struggle, especially with anxiety. 

When they worry, we worry. When your daughter finds herself on the “out” side of the triangle as her other two friends align against her, or when your son wants to miss school because he couldn’t understand his homework, we want to intervene. We want to rescue them from their pain because we feel it as our own. 

What happens when we do this? What happens, for example, when we talk to the two girls who are ganging up against our daughter- or worse, talk to their moms? What message does that send your daughter? That you care… or that she can’t resolve the situation herself. That she is incapable. When your son misses school because he didn’t do his homework, because he didn’t understand it and it made him feel “dumb,” what message are you sending him? Are you making him feel safe or are you teaching him that it is okay for him to avoid tough situations, situations that make him uncomfortable, because you don’t believe he can handle it? Believe it or not, while our teens may tell us that it helped them, in reality, they start to believe your perception of them- that they cannot handle pain, discomfort, failure. 

What is the answer? Encourage them to try, try to resolve the triangle situation, try to go to school and tell the teacher about the difficulty with the assignment and ask for help, to try to manage their desire to avoid and to build the resilience necessary to cope with the left hooks that life is going to throw their way. 

What better time and place to try and fail and then, have your support, not be alone-, tap into your wisdom of how to try another alternative while at the same time persevering- now THAT builds resilience, and THAT lowers anxiety!!!