Children are growing up in a changing world and face the anxiety that arises from uncertainty and disruption. As parents, it is important to equip your children to manage worry in a healthy way. On the Focus on the Family podcast, Dr. Josh and Christi Straub from Famous At Home, will share how to help your young child identify their emotions and manage fear so they can thrive.
Be a student of your child
For adults, there are many pulls in the world to take you away from spending quality time with your children. But one of the first things required of parents according to Dr. Josh Straub, is growing in your attentiveness to your children. Josh observes:
“We need to become students of our kids because every child is different and every child manages their emotions differently.”
Where one child may manifest their anxiety by withdrawing another may start misbehaving and acting out. Josh says you can be a student of your child by watching for changes at school, how they interact with their peers or changes in their grades at school. Josh observes,
“It starts with us as parents. We need to manage our own fears so we are not superimposing our own fears onto our kids.”
Josh says it’s vital for parents to become present with their children so they can identify troubling patterns that have changed over time in their child’s behavior.
Learning to ask the right questions
Christi highlights that we should be careful not to presume what our children are anxious about. Christi says, as parents, we can be afraid of what we’re going to find as we are trying to establish confident children that they know who they are in God.
“As parents, if we have a fear or worry script going on in our own heads, when we see it in our kids, we feel it magnified.”
Christi cautions parents that what they perceive as a problem in their children could just be a normal fear that their child is experiencing, like going to a new school. She highlights the need not to be presumptive and rather spend time with your child to hear their worries and insecurities. She notes,
“So often their worries are not what we assume them to be. They are actually very different from the things we assume them to be worried about.”
Christi suggests becoming a student of your child requires you to lean in as a parent to ask the right questions to get beneath the surface of worry and see what the real fears are.
Leaning into your child’s needs
The pre-teen years are critical for parents in guiding and nurturing their child. Josh says parents can avoid or delay talking to their children about what they are going through because they are afraid of what they will find out. But Josh warns, this only makes matters worse. It’s when you don’t foster communication with your child that it becomes dangerous and creates bigger problems down the track.
Today technology is playing a powerful role in how pre-teens manage their anxieties. Josh identifies how screens are being used by pre-teens, video games for boys and social media for girls, to numb their fears. Josh observes that it can be tempting for parents to ignore warning signs when their child starts to withdraw to a screen. Josh notes,
“If we as parents are not paying attention or we are just giving them the screen and letting them do their thing, we are building a wall between our hearts and their hearts.”
Adults can turn to screens also to numb out emotions, so it’s important for parents to recognise their own blindspots before their children start developing unhealthy habits of their own.
Recognising your own attitude to fear and worry
Josh highlights that your family of origin can have a deep impact in the way you process worry in front of your children. Some of our unhealthy beliefs and behaviours form at a very young age and can be difficult to shrug off as an adult. Josh went through the divorce of his parents when he was 10 years old and can now see that he carried unnecessary anxiety into his marriage as a consequence.
It is dangerous for either a parent to suppress, deny or repress emotions. Josh quotes King Solomon in Proverbs 16:32:
“Patience is better than power and controlling one’s emotions is better than capturing a city.”
Dr. Josh and Christi recognise that some parents may struggle with anxiety and worry more than others. Christi asks listeners to rate themselves on a scale of 1 to 10 to see how loud worry is in their lives. The letter of 2 Timothy talks about the need to walk in power, love and a sound mind. Once you can identify worry in your own life, Christi says, you can develop a greater self-awareness for how you may model how you process worry before your child.
Equipping your child with the tools to express their emotions
Worry should not be something to be dismissed or become overwhelmed by. Rather Josh suggests that listeners have a biblical mindset when it comes to managing anxiety. He quotes the Apostle Paul in Philippians 4:6:
“Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.”
The danger Josh warns is that the more you try to control and hold onto worry it just makes it worse. In Dr. Josh and Christi’s book What Do I Do About Worry?, they explore practical tools that children can learn how to release their worries to God.
Christi says it’s not about preventing our kids so they never enter into difficult environments.
“We want to be able to equip them and give them the language so they know how to handle (worry).”
Parents can become the most profound therapists for their kids. As parents, we can help children to draw or write what they are feeling to help them tell their story. By helping your child process their worry, it can help model for them how to manage their emotions in a constructive way.
To listen more to Dr. Josh and Christi Straub on equipping your children to navigate worry in healthy ways, download the podcast here.
About Dr. Joshua and Christi Straub
After leading New Life Fellowship Church for 26 years, Pete Scazzero co-founded Emotionally Healthy Discipleship, a groundbreaking ministry that moves the church forward by slowing the church down in order to multiply deeply changed leaders and disciples. Pete is the author of a number of bestselling books, including The Emotionally Healthy Leader and Emotionally Healthy Spirituality. Joshua and Christi Straub are speakers, authors, and marriage and leadership coaches. Together, they lead Famous at Home, a company equipping leaders, organizations, military families, and churches in emotional intelligence and family wellness. Together, they host the weekly Famous at Home podcast, lead a yearlong coaching cohort called The Leader’s Heart, and have two children’s books on emotional intelligence called What Am I Feeling? and What Do I Do With Worry? Josh and Christi love spending time on the lake with their three sweet kids and their feisty goldendoodle, Copper.
