Addressing anxiety in children

How to speak to children and address their global concerns

I noticed that my daughter was struggling to regulate and keep herself calm in the early days of lockdown. She was having nightmares and showed real anxiety about everyone getting poorly around her, and was very worried that her Dad and I might catch Covid-19. After some therapeutic parenting games, getting her to try and understand how she felt, I realised the issue mainly was that she couldn’t verbalise those feelings. They were so muddled that she couldn’t work out how she was feeling and was then becoming overwhelmed. I made up some stories to help begin those conversations, and thus Too Many Pants was born. Many children do not realise that adults have feelings also or that their own feelings are normal and okay to feel. By talking about something as silly as pants, children can begin to describe their feelings more readily: “I am wearing sleepy and grumpy pants today” and so on. This means that adults can use the same language to explain their own emotions creating a twoway street for a great emotional understanding of one another. Using a narrative to explain is a very effective way for a child to understand something at a level which they are at. This might be at a surface level where they see the basic story, or a deeper one where they relate to their own life and situations. Either way, the pressure and potential shame is taken off of themselves, and put on to the character as it is them who you are talking about and examining. The war in Ukraine is causing wide reaching anxiety among all ages due to the potential devastation that could occur. Hiding children from the news doesn’t help them as they will hear talk in the playground and overhear conversations at home or on the radio, so it is much healthier for them to have an appropriate explanation and a chance to identify their concerns and find a way to support them with these. They will be worrying anyway, so why not alleviate their worries and make their concerns feel validated and themselves listened to.

RUTH DRURY, Author of Too Many Pants www.writtenbyruth.com

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