Welcome back to the Anxiety Slayer Podcast. I'm Shan Vanderbilt League and today I'm here

with my wonderful friend and co-host Ananga Civier. We're offering suggestions to help children find relief from anxiety.

We're going to dig into the best way that parents and caregivers can respond to an anxious child.

We'll explore how parents can help kids stay calm and

in stressful situations and how to help children to face their fears.

Welcome back in Nanga.

Hey Shen.

So glad we're having this conversation today.

I think we begin by sharing that it's important to let the young ones know, to let our children know, that worry is natural.

It's a part of life.

Yeah, I used to suffer very strongly with anxiety as a child.

And so as we're having this discussion, I can see 10-year-old me and remember what that felt like.

And I think that is a really important thing to

reassure children that there's nothing wrong with them and that we can all feel

worried sometimes and not to make worry feel like a big monster that's lurking in the corner that's going to wreck everything but a natural

experience of life that we all worry sometimes. It's so important to allow time and space to hear them, even if their concerns might sound

lightweight to an adult. It isn't to them, it's real to them. And it's so important to hear them with patience and kindness and let them know that they have

support when they need it. I think for me what I really needed to know was that I wasn't a problem and I didn't have something terrible wrong with me that needed fixing which was how I would often bill and I think it's just so easy for a moment's impatience from a parent to do so much harm to a child that's already suffering with anxiety.

So just to remember to be patient, to be kind and take it from there.

And to remember that even though we want to fix everything and make life as easy and

sweet as we can for our kids, we can't.

We can't fix everything, but we can be there. We can let them know that we are there to support them.

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