Anxiety is a normal and useful emotion that helps us identify and react to real threats to our safety. Normal anxiety is protective, manageable, transient and limited to specific situations. Anxiety is a protective and motivational force that allows us to fight the threat head on or to take flight from the threat. However, if anxiety is too high or too low it is no longer helpful to us. When it is too low, we put ourselves in risky or dangerous situations. When anxiety is too high, we live in a state of hyper-vigilance that is both stressful and unsustainable (Aureen Pinto Wagner, 2005). During these uncertain and ever-changing times we are all experiencing what could best be described as real anxiety to real threats. There are ways we can help ourselves and the children in our lives cope and come through this turbulent time with greater resilience.
Children watch how the adults in their lives react to the world around them. They watch to see what we perceive as a threat, how we assess risk and especially, how we move forward and cope. Children who feel anxious will look to their caretakers to see if what they are scared of is a real threat and how they should respond. An easy way to think of this concept is through the example of flying on a plane when there is a period of heavy turbulence. During turbulence you may look to the flight attendants to see how they are reacting. If they are calmly sitting reading a magazine then your anxiety may go down because you think “They have been through this before and if they are not concerned I shouldn’t be either”. However, if the flight attendant is scrambling to secure things and is frantically relaying safety messages between pilot and passengers, your anxiety will (and probably should!) rise because the perceived threat has been confirmed by an external and more experienced source. This metaphor can be used to understand the research that says how parents cope in the face of adversity mediates how their child will cope when faced with adversity. (Fisak, Gallegos-Guajardo, Verreynne & Barrett, 2018)
If the adults in a child’s life are resilient during these times then children are far more likely to be resilient as well. This does not mean that as an adult you should pretend everything is fine to the children in your life – this is not about keeping face - on the contrary it means that you show children how to accurately identify threats and how to respond to them proportionally. One of the most effective ways that parents can help children to cope is to model healthy coping mechanisms. For example, if you are having a bad day and know that getting out-side would improve your mood then say so to your children. “I am feeling grumpy, I think I will go outside for a walk to make myself feel better. Would you like to come with me?”. While stark in its simplicity, it provides a self-contained lesson to a child highlighting your capacity to be aware of your own emotions, understand the effects these emotions may have on your thoughts and behavior and most crucially, that you can identify a restorative behavior, prioritize and then enact it.
In knowing that our children are watching how we cope, the most important thing we can do for our children is to make sure we become aware of and take care of our own anxiety during these stressful times. So how do you know as a parent when your anxiety is too high or too low and you are falling into maladaptive coping?
Well, you may find yourself following your thinking brain or your emotional brain to the exception of all else. This extreme “black or white” thinking leads us to become too rigid or too loose in our actions. A healthier state would be for us to bring those two sides together to make better informed and less reactive decisions on which to base our actions. When talking with parents about this in my private practice, I have been using the dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) concept called “Walking the middle path”. The rationale of this model is best explained in the words of its originator; “To walk the middle path is to move away from extreme emotional responses, actions and thinking, and toward balanced and integrative responses to life situations.” (M. Linehan, 2015) We can use this concept as a bearing with which to navigate the current (and very real) threat of the Covid-19 Pandemic. For example, the actions of an individual in response to Covid-19 might be to stay home until there is a vaccine or, in contrast, to rush out into public so as to reclaim their normal life as quickly as possible. To walk the middle path would be to see that while these two responses feel valid, they are a result of either too much or too little anxiety. To combat this try to move towards a more balanced way of thinking. In this instance, walking the middle path would be consciously and judiciously assessing the level of risk on a recurrent basis and making decision to act within the boundaries of the rational and responsible.
We as a society are riding a rollercoaster of new information reporting the threat level of the pandemic - reporting which tends to favor extremes of information and advice. As adults we have the cognitive (and hopefully) the emotional regulation to be able to roll with these uncertain times. However, children do not fair so well on this information rollercoaster. We need to be the filter of information by assessing the risk and making a decision before sharing with children how we will respond to it. For example sharing with a child “While we don’t know how long the virus will be here, we do know how to keep ourselves healthy by wearing masks, social distancing and washing our hands.” This simple statement acknowledges to our children what we can’t control and what we can. This allows us to model how we intend to walk that middle path with our children.
By way of pragmatism, I always encourage parents to be mindful of three specific things;
1. That anxiety is a response to danger, it serves a helpful purpose in our lives. It only becomes a problem when there is an over estimation of risk paired with an underestimation of their ability to cope.
2. Children look to their caregivers to assess the severity of a threat and learn how to respond. If we are confident in our ability to cope and show confidence in our children’s ability to cope, then they will be resilient.
3. Walking the middle path can keep you as a parent aware of your anxiety levels during these turbulent times and help you come to a more balanced way of thinking and responding to real threats in our world.
I wish you well on your path.
Sarah