Do you have worried and anxious children? Here is how you can help them easily and quickly!
Parents can feel disempowered to help their child, as they can feel that they do not understand how to intervene to support them through their worry and feelings of stress.
Situations do not cause worry and anxiety. It is thoughts that cause them! There is a big difference between "Mental Health Issues" and “Emotional Health Issues”.
During my training in Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) and Coaching Children, it was taught that children develop their emotional awareness rapidly, by the age of around 7 it is well developed. This is not the case for their reasoning ability, which lags way behind, taking up until late teens to mid-20’s to fully develop. A large gap, so the challenge for the youngster is that they have all the emotional capability to worry about life but do not have the reasoning to rationalise it and put it into perspective.
Many of us can remember being children ourselves and can also recognise this in the youngsters around us in its many manifestations, we used to worry about what would be considered to us now as trivial, but when we where young it was huge!
To support your youngster, talk through their worries head on, help them to put them into perspective and help rationalise their thoughts and concerns through your experience and guidance as an adult with both the emotional and reasoning abilities fully mature, once the worry is tackled the stress and anxiety disappears.
Also, if you remember Harry Enfields, Kevin the Teenager, then this is the just another manifestation of this. As the teenagers starts to want to withdraw from the maternal, paternal environment, to start their own lives, often we can see that sometimes it is a smooth moving away, when futher education forces the break, but when the teenager is at home when they should be leaving naturally, they may take an extreme path to pull away, through rejection! To push those back who have been at the old centre of their lives. They use all their wellformed emotional skills to start to force the move away, without the ability to recognise and to reason how cruel they are perhaps being. Leaving them and the object of their emotions devastated. However when you know this as a parent, recognise it for what it is and try not to take it to heart. IT IS THEM, NOT YOU. Not fully mature enough to manage adult relationships.
You should of course, seek professional advice from your GP if you think that this is more serious than just over worrying. I am not a mental or health professional, I leave that to them, I am trained and qualified in Neuro Linguistic Programming NLP. A professional NLP practitioner will be able to offer support. (I only work with adults. The NLP registered practitioners’ website www.anlp.org can help find a practitioner in your area, if you feel that this is worth exploring for your child.)