Anxiety Specialty
Do you feel that your child is overly anxious? Are they easily upset about having to do certain things?
Are they overly focused on certain fears or worries? Have they refused to do age-appropriate things, and now have you do those things for them? Has the household had to work around a child’s strong aversions to doing certain things? Can the child be demanding and insistent about those things? Have you tried reassuring your child? Reasoning with them that their worries are not things they need to worry about?
Do you walk on eggshells around them, afraid they will blow up at any moment? Are they clearly suffering under the weight of their worries? Is your anxious child affecting the lives of your other children? You would like your child to do the same kinds of things that other kids their age can do.
You would like them to be less rigid and limited as to what they can do. You would like them to not be so reliant on you to do things for them. You would like to understand why your child is anxious and how you can help address their anxiety? You like to be able to recognize and address minor anxieties before they grow out of control.
If you are concerned that your child’s anxieties are taking over them and your family, you’re in the right place.
Your child’s anxiety does not have to run your lives. It may feel impossible now, but parents can learn to reduce and manage their child’s anxiety.
Therapy for child anxiety can help you do these things:
Understand how anxiety works, and how avoidance shrinks and limits a child’s world.
Learn the tools and strategies to get your child’s anxiety and avoidance under control.
Support your child as they practice new skills in overcoming their anxiety and being BRAVE.
Therapy for Childhood Anxiety Will Help Your Child Become Brave!
Through therapy for childhood anxiety, parents and their child together will learn about how anxiety works for us. You will learn about how anxiety helps keep us safe and how it can get out of control. Our therapy sessions will equip you with specific tools and strategies to handle your child’s anxiety. Strategies are based on the latest research on managing anxiety and are practical and straightforward to master.
Practice (exposure) is key to progress and we will plan out how this can be done. Your child’s anxiety will make them naturally resistant to this, but we will add incentives that will make it worth their while. As your child masters their anxiety, they will be able to engage in a wider variety of healthy, age-appropriate activities. The skills you and your child learn will serve them lifelong in managing natural anxieties that may present themselves.
Go From This:
Rigid Behavior
Digging in their heels
Emotional outbursts – angry, sad, fearful
Clinginess
Refusal to engage in ordinary activities
Household arguing, reassuring, cajoling
To This:
Relaxed demeanor
Improved management of emotions
Increased emotional maturity
Ability to take part in typical activities
Increased confidence and self-esteem
Improved parent-child relationship
Who is therapy with me for?
Therapy with me is a good fit for you if:
They are between 4 and 12 years old
Both parents (if living together) attend all therapy sessions
Both parents (if living together) are willing to learn and make changes to benefit their child.
A single parent attends all therapy sessions and is willing to learn and make changes to benefit their child.
Therapy with me is NOT a good fit for you if:
Their parents engaged in a contentious divorce
They exhibit behaviors consistent with severe OCD.
If your child has be diagnosed with OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder) and their symptoms severely limit their ability to function.
If parents are severely anxious and are not able to tolerate their child taking any risks.
If the family has experienced a contentious divorce.
Questions and Objections
Does Child Anxiety Therapy really work?
In the decades I have been doing this work with families, I have been very pleased with how willing both parents have been to participate in this important process. The Dads (sorry, but they are usually the ones left out of this undertaking!) that I have worked with have universally been invested -- in their parenting, in their children, in coordinating with their parenting partner, and in making necessary changes in their parenting. It’s been a pleasure and a delight to witness fathers’ knowledge about and investment in their children.
This work is much more powerful when both parenting partners add their perspective, personalities, and skills to the therapeutic process. Sharing the parenting of a child with challenges allows parents to work together as a team.
We are concerned you will tell us our child needs to take medicine.
I am not a physician and cannot prescribe medicine. The work we do together will center on learning new techniques and strategies to help you manage your child’s anxiety. You will all gain a new set of skills to address your child’s needs.
There will be cases in which my professional judgement dictates that I inform you about the potential benefits of medicine for your child. Early in my career I made sure we exhausted all options before exploring the possibility of medicine for my child clients. However, after seeing how well their child responded to medicine, many parents expressed regrets that they had waited so long to try medicine, and felt that their child had lost important time.
I will suggest an evaluation for medication when I note that a child may not be able to achieve their parents’ goals for them without it. That said, parents are free to decide for themselves what treatment options they choose to pursue.
We just want our child to be happy. Is that a reasonable goal?
In a perfect world, happiness would be a reasonable goal. But in our world, life will present everyone with challenges. My goal for your child will be resilience – the ability to manage themselves in good times and in adversity. To me, resilience is the closest you can get to happiness and is a powerful quality to foster in a child.
How do we get started?
Getting started is easy! Just contact me to schedule a free initial consultation call. During that call, we will decide if I am the right therapist for your family. If I am, we will schedule our first session. If I am not the right therapist for you, I will point you in the direction of someone who can help.
Yes, it does! We now have some great strategies and techniques to address anxiety that are effective and not too difficult to do.
Our work together will start with describing how anxiety is limiting your child’s and your family’s life. Then I will explain how anxiety works. Once parents have a clear understanding of how anxiety works, the strategies and interventions I recommend will make sense.
The strategies and methods used have been shown to be successful in reaching parents’ short term goals of reducing their child’s anxiety and allowing the child to participate in daily activities. They can also become life-long habits to address anxieties that arise later. These habits will promote healthy resiliency in your child for the long term.