Cultivating Resilience

In children, powerful emotions come with the territory. Contending with academic pressure, social media stress, worries about the future, and concerns about mental health, it is easy for children—and parents—to feel anxious and overwhelmed. But it does not have to be that way. In January, ParentWiser invited Dr. Lisa Damour and Reena Ninan to provide a Q & A presentation to share their clear, researchinformed explanations alongside illuminating, real-life examples and give parents the concrete, practical information they need to steady their children through the bumpy yet transformational journey into adulthood.

How can a parent help with a high-performing low-grade level kid’s anxiety issues related to homework and other extracurricular activities? Where do the parents start with anxiety?

Psychologists have always recognized that anxiety is a normal healthy function. Some anxiety is good for people to keep them from doing dangerous things. This is rational anxiety. We don't want to treat this type of anxiety like something we're trying to get rid of altogether. The anxiety that needs to get treated is the irrational anxiety which means the level of anxiety is higher than makes sense in the context. When we come across irrational anxiety, it is always the case that the person who is anxious is overestimating the danger and underestimating their ability to manage the danger. There's a handy DIY try or the at-home approach that parents can use to manage the anxiety: a parent may say, “Okay, tell me what your worry is about?” Have a conversation with the kids to get the anxiety down to a rational level and find out what your kid is worried about in terms of their ability to do the work. Find out what the sense of loss of control is and how bad it is, then smush it.

What are some of the best anxiety activities and strategies you recommend to teach children to manage their anxiety in situations where they may not have access to a parent?

When kids are anxious and especially when they’re younger, but also later into adolescence, they often come to their parents for help with their feelings. However, there are many other ways that can help kids feel better when they have upset feelings. Talking to someone sometimes is not the best option when it turns into rumination, which is the psychological term for where a person is talking about something. The more this person talks about it, the worse he/she feels. It is kind of the emotional equivalent of picking at a wound. So, under these conditions, parents need other strategies that kids can use that do not require the presence of a grown-up: 1. Try not to think about the thing that’s making them anxious that they cannot do anything about it. Find a distraction that changes their mental channel; 2. Breathing deeply and slowly can powerfully control anxiety. A shift in breathing tells their brain that it is now safe; it helps the brain calm down. Talk to the kids about why breathing works and that it can be done quietly in the middle of class without other people noticing.

How can parents encourage their kids to do better in areas that he/ she is not interested in or motivated?

There’s a metaphor that parents can first use when talking to their kids: School is like a buffet where students are required to eat everything. But there will always be some stuff they like and some stuff they would never like. The reality is that schools are going to ask students to eat everything on the buffet now and find out later which things they like best (i.e., which items on the buffet are their favorite subjects). Talk to kids about this metaphor around food. Many kids appreciate it because it takes away the shame about not wanting to consume everything being delivered and offers empathy.

How to deal with teenagers when they have meltdowns, especially 7th - 9th graders, who have emotional meltdowns far more than they used to?

The reason for this is at that age, their brain is remodeling, and the part of the brain which houses the emotions gets upgraded before the more sophisticated part of the brain, which maintains the ability to have a perspective on anything. The best metaphor is to think of a glitter jar. Parents can get a jar, fill it with water, two tablespoons of sparkly glitter at the bottom, and glue the lid. When a teenager or a kid has a meltdown, shake the jar and show it to them. Tell them it is like their brain right now; their emotions have hijacked the whole system. Then, settle the jar on a table and ask them to sit there and watch the glitter settle down. What is quite remarkable is that if kids have a chance to re-regulate emotionally, to give their emotions a chance to quiet down, it either solves the problem because the problem was that they became overwhelmed, or it allows them to be able to solve the problem because they have their frontal lobes back online and can really make it through.

How do these principles relate to students with ADHD but the maturity level is lower than their age?

Students with ADHD tend to be a couple of years behind, both socially and academically. The reason they are missing a lot of information is because their attention is scattered. Parents need to work with clinicians who specialize in this and can give very tailored and specific strategies that will work for the specific child. There are a wide variety of strategies that can work for ADHD students, like being in the front row, having a planner, setting phone reminders, or having structured support at school, etc. It makes a huge difference when students adopt good strategies and figure out the ones that work for them.

How do parents prevent themselves from doing everything for their ADHD students?

In a parent’s busy life, it’s easy to jump in, take over and make things happen because it’s vastly more efficient to do such. It is hard to let go and make the time to allow the kids to do things for themselves. It involves inventing systems that we are not accustomed to. Handing something off to a kid does take time to help them figure out how to make it happen. Again, there are a lot of strategies that work for ADHD kids. If one strategy does not work, do something else and work with the kid to see what strategies might help.

Please give us a Parenting-To-Go tip.

Parenting has always been a really challenging thing to do. Development is a bumpy road, and it’s always been a bumpy road. The parenting job is to support healthy problem-solving and healthy coping that lowers the bar to something realistic. Let development do its thing.

To listen to a full length of Dr. Lisa Damour’s Q & A speech, please visit: ParentWiser website (https://www.parentwiser.org/).

Dr. Lisa Damour and Reena Ninan co-host the podcast Ask Lisa: The Psychology of Parenting. Dr. Damour is recognized as a thought leader by the American Psychological Association. She writes about adolescents for the New York Times and appears as a regular contributor to CBS News. She is the author of two New York Times best sellers and the soon-to-be-published book, The Emotional Lives of Teenagers: Raising Connected, Capable, and Compassionate Adolescents. Reena Ninan is a television journalist who has worked as a White House correspondent, foreign reporter, and news anchor for CBS, ABC, and Fox News. She recently started her own media company, Good Trouble Productions.