Spotlight on Anxiety, Kids’ Edition: Worry Time

Parents of kids who worry wind up doing a lot of “worry management” throughout each day.  Kids who worry can ask the same question over and over (and over…).  They’ll voice concerns about an upcoming situation that’s worrying them again and again… and again.  As a parent, it can feel like you’re working hard, all day, to respond to a near-constant onslaught of worry chatter.  You’re using all of your tricks – extra love and reassurance, distraction, maybe even some kind of ‘tough love’ here and there – but it doesn’t really stop the flow.

As a parent, you strive to be responsive, to be there for your kids.  You don’t want to shut them down when they’re expressing uncomfortable feelings to you.  You want to keep those crucial communication channels open.  You’re grateful that your kids feel they can come to you with their anxieties, even if it feels like anxious conversation is the dominant conversation you’re having with your child.

• You’re right to be sensitive to your child’s need to express their anxiety to you.
• You’re right to signal to your child that you can hear them, that you can handle it, that you’re there.
• You’re right to keep an eye on those communication channels.  You’ll be grateful for them as your child gets older and it becomes even more important to know what’s going on.

However, anxious kids who worry a lot actually need their parents’ help to curb the amount of time they spend on worrying.  They also need their parents’ help to dial down the emotions that come up when they worry about this or that.

Worry Time can help.

Worry Time is the time that you designate each day during which your child is encouraged to focus only on their worries, and nothing else.  Instead of worries trickling out over the course of the entire day, your anxious child will know that she gets 10 minutes of Worry Time in the morning and another 10 minutes in the afternoon.  During that time, she’s encouraged to name all of her worries; really:  all of them.

It may seem counterintuitive, but the idea behind Worry Time is actually to contain the anxiety your child feels.  The strategy, literally called “containment,” is a principle of cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), a well-researched treatment for anxious kids.  When we offer kids a container in which they can store their worries and all of the uncomfortable feelings they bring, it helps them focus better on everything else they have to do during the day.  In short, it helps them worry less.

Your job during Worry Time is just to be there.  To listen.  To encourage your child to dig deep and think of ALL of the worries he’s got.  There’s no effort to talk him out of his worries. You just want to make sure your child gets them all out there. With Worry Time, we are saying,

“I know you have all of these things you’re worried about.  Your worries can sometimes get in the way of all the fun there is to have and the learning there is to do during the day.  So, let’s give your worries this special time each day.  We’ll name all of the worries and how they make you feel.  We won’t try and fight your worries or change them or make them stop.  We’ll let them out for a good romp.”  

But here’s the thing:  what we’re also saying with Worry Time is this:

“When it’s not Worry Time, we’re not going to talk about your worries. We’re going to focus on the other parts of our day.”

In the beginning, it may be hard for a big worrier to wait for Worry Time.  When they come to you with a worry outside of Worry Time, you can gently remind them that you’ll both talk only about worries when it’s Worry Time – but until Worry Time, you’re both going to focus on other things.

What tends to happen, ultimately, is that kids get it:  worries get aired during Worry Time, and only during Worry Time.  What also tends to happen is that Worry Time gets kind of boring.  When you stop trying to fight against the anxious thoughts – when you get it all out there without any attempt to change them at all – the worries start to lose their emotional luster.  While it might seem like giving your child a platform on which they can declare their worries will only serve to give the worries more power, it’s actually the opposite:  when a child declares their worries, when they take the swirling thoughts in their heads and put them into words, get them out into the sunlight, it is your child who takes back the power.

During morning Worry Time, your child may hear themselves say, “No one will talk to me at school today, and I’m going to sit alone at lunch, and I’ll have nothing to do during recess – nothing!” Yet they go off to school and their worries generally prove unfounded.  Later, during afternoon Worry Time, or maybe the next day during morning Worry Time, it may sound strange to your child to declare the same worries about what’s going to happen at school.  The evidence just doesn’t support it.  After some time of declaring these very specific social worries and seeing that, day after day, they really don’t pan out, those worries lose their “oomph.”  They just don’t have the same command they used to.

Soon enough, you may find that your child has a hard time filling up Worry Time with worries.  They'll try - and you'll encourage them to really think and get out every single worry they have - but some of the worries will start to fall off.  At that point, maybe you go down to just one daily Worry Time slot.  If two slots works better for your child, you can keep them both.  You just might find that you start to trim how long each slot lasts - but only when it's clear that your child doesn't need as much Worry Time anymore.

As I mentioned earlier in this post, Worry Time, and the principle of containment is associated with cognitive-behavioral therapy, CBT.  It is a strategy that may be helpful to your child as a stand-alone, but it often works best when used in conjunction with other components of CBT.  You can read more about CBT here, or click here to read about another strategy associated with CBT known as externalization.

If your child is worrying a lot (or if you’re worrying a lot), consider reaching out for help. Just click here to set up a free consultation, so we can see if working together could help your child (or, perhaps you) reduce the amount of worry they’re trying to manage each day.

* Photo credit: https://motherwellmag.com