A Parent’s Guide To Anxiety

We’ve all felt it. That creeping sense of dread, followed by a taunting internal voice that seems well-versed in all of our worst fears. Our thoughts run on repeat, with seemingly no way to break the cycle. We feel trapped by the neverending soundtrack and just want some way to make it stop.

Everyone at the party is thinking about how underdressed you are. All eyes in the room are on you-and they’re all judging you. No one is on your side, they’re all out to get you.

You’re going to miss a deadline at work and not only will you be fired, but everyone will talk about you behind your back. You will be considered a failure and there will be no way to get back to the normal, stable, successful person you now are. No one will ever give you a chance again and they’ll all write you off.

Your kids are going to get sick and be hospitalized thanks to the germs at school. The people you love will suffer and there is nothing you will be able to do about it. The outside world holds so much danger and you can’t protect your kids from what scares you the most.

The voice ebbs and flows, getting increasingly louder on sleepless nights and stressful mornings. Occasionally, almost all of us will wake up one morning with a pit in our stomach and a firm conviction that this is the day that everything is just going to fall apart.

And while it is normal to experience feelings like this from time to time, when these emotions and physical sensations continue for an extended period, it’s often an indication that someone is struggling with chronic anxiety or an anxiety disorder.

Feelings of anxiety and anxiety disorders are different. Anxiousness or anxious feelings come and go, do not inhibit a person’s ability to function, and are usually triggered by specific circumstances. Anxiety disorders are chronic, do not always have an identifiable cause, and are severe enough to interfere with a person’s ability to go about their daily life.

Anxiety disorders that fit this clinical definition are sharply rising, particularly in young people-and not only teens, but in children as young as three years old. In 2022, the CDC reported that 10% of children ages 3-17 had diagnosed anxiety disorders, with higher rates in females than males. And that statistic only reflects those who have sought out a diagnosis; it doesn’t include those struggling without one.

Anxiety disorders in adolescents have a strong correlation with other disorders such as behavioral disorders, depression or self-harm and suicide. [To equip parents with the tools to recognize and respond to self-harm and suicide, we also have a Parent Guide on these topics.]

In this Parent Guide, we’ll discuss both these temporary feelings of anxiety and longer-term anxiety disorders, as well as how parents and caring adults can walk through these issues with the rising generation.

Before we go further, remember that this Parent Guide is not a diagnostic tool or a substitute for professional psychological or psychiatric help. If you believe that your child is exhibiting symptoms of an anxiety disorder or any other mental health condition, please see a mental health professional for advice on treatment and next steps. And if you believe your teen is experiencing a mental health crisis and may be in danger of taking their own life, please call or text 988 for immediate help from the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, or take your child to the nearest emergency room and explain the situation to the attendant staff.

What is anxiety?

The American Psychological Association defines anxiety, and distinguishes it from fear, in this way:

Anxiety is an emotion characterized by feelings of tension, worried thoughts, and physical changes like increased blood pressure… Anxiety is not the same as fear, but they are often used interchangeably. Anxiety is considered a future-oriented, long-acting response broadly focused on a diffuse threat, whereas fear is an appropriate, present-oriented, and short-lived response to an identifiable and specific threat.

Anxiety, like fear, is very normal. It is a more prolonged experience than fear, but both are natural human responses to stressful circumstances and events. Anxiety disorders, however, are a much more serious issue.

These disorders fall under five distinct diagnoses:

• Generalized Anxiety Disorder is exhibited by chronic, persistent anxiety that occurs seemingly without a cause.
• Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, in which a person experiences repetitive intrusive thoughts, and feels compelled to perform certain behaviors (or “rituals”) to alleviate those thoughts.
• Panic Disorder, in which a person’s anxiety is condensed into episodes called panic attacks when they experience intense moments of overwhelming fear accompanied by physical symptoms.
• Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, which many people develop following exposure to or the experience of a significantly harmful event such as a violent encounter, natural disaster, or an experience of betrayal.
• Social Anxiety Disorder, in which a person develops intense feelings of anxiety in situations involving other people.

According to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America, 19.1% of adults in the U.S. have been diagnosed with an anxiety disorder. The National Institute of Mental Health reports that adolescents experience anxiety disorders at an even higher rate, 31.9%, making this the most common mental disorder in the U.S.

Anxiety in teens and kids

Research done by the National Institute of Mental Health revealed an estimated 32% of adolescents living in the U.S. have experienced an anxiety disorder. Although anxiety disorders occur more often in females than in males, other characteristics like age, ethnicity, and geography play no role in who develops anxiety. Unfortunately, only 7% of young people who need mental health help receive it according to McClean Hospital.

Not only do clinical studies reveal anxiety and anxiety disorders to be on the rise, but this trend is reflected in teen and youth culture more broadly, particularly on the internet. On TikTok alone, as of this writing around 7 million videos have been tagged with #anxiety, and have gotten around 21 billion video views. Videos include stories on experiences with anxiety and many offer advice or links to resources to help those struggling with anxiety. Unfortunately, much of the advice is unsupported by medical professionals and can even be more harmful than helpful.

Even though we are now several years past the onset of COVID-19, we are still seeing the effects of that time period in children. For example, elementary school kids who formed significant memories during the pandemic are at higher risk for developing pediatric anxiety than children who grew up before COVID-19.

Add that to the string of stressful life events that were already impacting Gen Z and Gen Alpha: both generations are growing up in a world of internet comparison and online bullying, and many attend school every day with fears that their school might be the target of the next mass shooter.

No wonder kids are experiencing so much anxiety.

The Anxious Generation

Dr. Jonathan Haidt’s groundbreaking book, The Anxious Generation, examines factors that have contributed to the rapid rise of mental health disorders since 2010 and provides actionable solutions to help our children grow into resilient, emotionally stable adults.

Haidt theorizes that two main factors help explain the rise of anxiety in young people: the decline of play-based childhood and the rise of phone-based childhood. Beginning in the 1980s and speeding up in the 90s and early 2000s, overprotective parenting led to a decrease in unsupervised free play for children, depriving them of the vital opportunity to test limits and abilities, establish close relationships through shared adventure, and engage in risk assessment-all of which are vital experiences for children learning how to cope with the natural fears and anxieties of childhood.

Why is unsupervised free play so important? Children need to experience regular setbacks and stressors in order to grow into resilient, emotionally stable adults. Much of free play allows just this.

The second major factor is the smartphone. Social media apps, virtual communication and a decrease in face-to-face interaction have drastically and negatively impacted our children’s ability to form deep interpersonal relationships, establish healthy sleep patterns, have developmentally appropriate attention spans, and self-regulate media consumption.

Dr. Haidt has found that girls experience a much higher rate of mental health disorders, such as anxiety, eating disorders, depression, and self-harm, than their male counterparts. He posits that this is in large part due to social media consumption and the invention of the front-facing phone camera, allowing an influx of selfies and lifestyle photos, mostly edited beyond the scope of reality. For adolescent girls especially, comparison has led to increased rates of mental health disorders.

Haidt also found that many boys struggle more with academic performance and social interaction due to an increased retreat into an online life, whether that be with video games, pornography, or other forms of online consumption. These boys are increasingly losing touch with the real, embodied world in preference for the virtual one.

Phone use, social media, and online involvement are not all bad. We are now able to connect with loved ones easier than ever before, keep up long-distance relationships through online connection, and have access to knowledge at the touch of a button. The difficult work is finding a balance between real-world and online engagement.

Anxiety in Scripture

The word “fear” is mentioned hundreds of times in the Bible (not including the many “fear not”s). The word “anxiety,” appears a few dozen times as both a verb and a noun. Clearly, extreme worry has been a prevalent human experience long before modern research categorized it as a disorder. And clearly, God cares about anxiety and those who experience it.

One of the most significant uses of the word “anxiety” is found in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, recounted in Matthew 6. In Greek, the word used in these verses is “merimnao,” meaning “to be troubled with cares.” In many translations, the word “anxiety” is replaced with “worry,” which comes from the Old High German word “wurgen,” meaning “to strangle.” So apt that this etymology captures the embodied experience of feeling strangled when experiencing anxiety.

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus acknowledges some of the very real stressors that can cause us anxiety— and often, to turn away from him-and asks us to see our lives from a different perspective (Mt. 6:26-30):

Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life? And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you?

Jesus knows that when we don’t feel safe, our anxiety levels naturally increase-in this passage, the source of anxiety being a lack of food and clothing. In the face of such a daunting lack, what does He do? He asks us to look at the world around us… to the birds and the flowers, the smallest and most vulnerable in the natural world.

If the Lord provides what is needed for the lowest in the natural world, how much more will he care for and provide for us too, the most precious of his creation?

He exhorts us not just to “get over it” and move on, but to release the worries we cling to because we trust that God is aware of and will bring us the things we require to live and do His work. We can put our needs in the hands of God because “your heavenly Father knows you need them” (Matthew 6:32). We are safe to release ourselves from bondage to anxiety.

Though Scripture may not speak as directly to anxiety disorders as it does to our anxious feelings, that does not mean that God does not care about the serious afflictions we experience. Take the woman with the bleeding disorder in Luke 8: though not experiencing an anxiety disorder, she daily struggled with debilitating physical, social, mental, and emotional pain. Unable to participate in community life due to her affliction, she was increasingly ostracized and left alone to deal with her pain.

Jesus restored her to wholeness (Luke 8:48), not only healing her physical ailment, but restoring her to community and giving her back the full life she had lost. Jesus’s mission is to restore wholeness to his whole world, including the physical and mental brokenness we experience.

But what are we to do when we are still waiting for the promise of wholeness? When we are still living in a world where anxiety exists, and is hard?

Let’s first acknowledge a few myths. We do not experience anxiety disorders because of a lack of faith. Anxiety disorders are not the result of a failure to pray hard enough or believe enough in God’s healing powers. Anxiety disorders are a medical condition, just as the woman with the bleeding issues experienced a medical condition.

Our world is broken and we daily experience the effects of this brokenness-in experiences of anxiety, depression, suffering, death, and many other afflictions. But this is not what God intended and this is not the state in which He leaves us. God is good and He is moving the world towards ultimate healing in the new creation.

How to help your child with anxiety

The Anxious Generation: Course Correction

So what can we do as parents to help our kids with anxiety? The Anxious Generation is most helpful for parents of kids who have not yet reached high school, as Dr. Haidt’s suggestions are predominantly preventative in nature.

If the two main contributors are a loss of free play and the rise of smartphone usage, let’s start there.

• Kids need time to play outside with other kids, ideally of varying age groups, and ideally unsupervised. Maybe you have a backyard, a park around the corner, a basement play area or other space you can offer for your children and their friends to play in.
• Prioritize real-world connections over virtual ones. We were created as social, embodied creatures who need face-to-face connections. Without these opportunities, we are not able to learn verbal and nonverbal communication and our relationships suffer. Plan weekly family dinners, host regular friend gettogethers, and enroll in clubs or sports teams.
• Avoid a smartphone as a first phone. Instead, give a “dumb phone” with minimal capabilities and no internet access. This encourages viewing phones as a communication tool and not an entertainment device.
• Hold off on the smartphone until high school. This is easier said than done, especially if your child feels like the only one who doesn’t have one. However, without the constant ability to visit online sites, your child can better learn how to engage in the very real, social world in which they live.
• Avoid making social media accounts until at least high school. Since many young women are experiencing a radically escalating mental health crisis related to social media comparison, limiting their exposure can greatly decrease their risk of developing mental health issues like anxiety.

Is this overwhelming? Do your children already have access to smartphones and social media and you don’t know how to dial it back? Healthy relationships to phones and social media are possible and your child can learn how to engage appropriately.

Start with open and honest communication with your child about the dangers of unfettered phone usage. Maybe you read The Anxious Generation together, have a discussion about how they view their phone habits and what is positive and negative, or set up a phone usage plan with time limitations and a phone curfew.

In any case, practice trust with your child and work on finding solutions together. Try to avoid mandating phone restrictions, as this can lead to strained relationships and a loss of trust from your child.

Working together helps strengthen your relationship and empowers your child to make healthy decisions for themselves. After all, part of Dr Haidt’s call to free play is essentially about how practicing trust in your child is part of raising independent, healthy kids.

For more help instituting healthy phone usage, visit Dr. Haidt’s online supplement, Common Sense Media, or the Center for Humane Technology.

What can I do?

Model healthy emotional management. We are children’s first teachers on how to handle big emotions. Even if our kids are well into their teens, they will take in how you process tough situations. These three practices can help you deal with frustration, sadness, or feeling overwhelmed:

• The 3-3-3 rule: Name three things you see, three things you hear, and three things you can move or touch.
• The 5-5-5 rule: Breathe in for 5 seconds, hold for 5 seconds, breathe out for 5 seconds. These first two techniques both help ground you in your body and calm your nervous system.
• Verbalizing what you feel and what you can do about it. We can’t change what we feel, but naming the emotion and managing our reaction to it is in our control.

Kids will mirror our emotional reactions, whether they are 5, 15, or 25. If you are uncomfortable expressing your emotions or don’t know how to handle your own anxiety, consider seeking professional help yourself. The best thing we can do for kids is to model healthy behavior.

We won’t always get it right, but the important thing is to try. We are all works in progress, being made more into the likeness of Christ every day.

Don’t eliminate stressors-help process them with your child. Your child will face stressful and anxiety inducing experiences in their life and they need to learn how to healthily deal with them as early as possible. Whisking them away from a negative experience contributes to learned helplessness and does not teach them how to cope with future stressful situations.

Instead, face those stressors with them by asking non-leading questions to help process through the situation with them. Asking questions like these can help teach resilience:

• What is making you feel stressed?
• Can you tell me more about the emotions you are feeling?
• What do you think is causing this anxiety?
• What would happen if [insert anxiety-inducing situation here] occurred?

Walking through a worst-case scenario with your child and working out a plan together of how to handle it can decrease the anxiety your child feels towards the situation. Dr. Susan Biali Haas, who specializes in mental health and has struggled with anxiety and depression in her own life, argues, “It changes your brain’s physiology to face your fears, especially in doses you can handle without getting completely overwhelmed… If I had chickened out, I would have taught my brain that fear and avoidance is the right reaction to this “threat,” and it would have been worse the next time.”

In Dr. John Medina‘s molecular biology research, he has found that naming emotions, even at ages as young as birth through 5 years of age, helps kids process anxious thoughts and be able to respond to future emotions with stability. So name the emotions! Work through a plan with your child for how to handle those negative emotions. Their future selves will thank you for it.

Get outside and get moving. Exercising is one of the best ways to help our bodies feel better mentally, emotionally, and physically, and it has been shown to decrease rates of anxiety in all age groups. Only around 2.5 hours of aerobic activity a week can drastically impact our ability to cope with anxiety. That’s about 30 minutes each weekday!

Maybe your teen enjoys hiking, sports, going on walks, or more traditional ways to get exercise. Washing the car, mowing the lawn, or walking to and from school are also ways to get exercise! The bonus of these activities is they give your teens more responsibility and independence too.

Develop a spiritual practice. Prayer is an integral part of Christian life and God wants to hear from us. Maybe your child is a verbal processor and praying out loud helps them connect best with God. Maybe they enjoy journaling and processing their thoughts through writing. In addition, nightly family prayer or short Bible readings are great ways of connecting as a family and establishing a corporate worship practice.

When a colleague of ours was in elementary school and struggling with anxiety, her mom would write verses on napkins and put them in her lunch box to help her get through the day. The Lord is a steady rock and fortress, in whom we can take refuge when everything around us feels chaotic (Ps. 18:2).

Seek professional help. One of the most effective strategies for treating anxiety is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), offered by many licensed therapists. The American Psychological Association defines CBT as a talk therapy that encourages patients to identify faulty reasoning in relation to stressors and trains the brain to change their thought and behavior patterns to relieve the symptoms of anxiety.

Therapists will help patients see their stressors in relation to reality, develop problem-solving skills, face their fears through role-play, and many other activities to help retrain their brains to respond to anxiety.

Licensed therapist Amanda Grace often encourages parents of anxious teens to seek counseling, noting that if parents can learn how to emotionally regulate their own behaviors, they are better equipped to support their children. Every parental relationship is different and having a professional guide you toward personally tailored intervention strategies is a great place to start.

In severe cases, psychiatrists can prescribe anti-anxiety medication, often benzodiazepines, to help reduce the symptoms of anxiety by calming the nervous system and allowing the body to sleep.

Anxiety disorders are the leading mental health condition in adolescents. It is not a sign of weakness to need help dealing with their effects. Medical and therapeutic professionals are best equipped to support you and your child.

Establish healthy sleep hygiene. One of the most common symptoms and side effects of anxiety is difficulty sleeping. When we are not sleeping, it is even easier for our bodies to spiral and not function properly. It is a vicious cycle.

There are myriad suggestions for establishing a good sleep routine, but here are a few of the simplest changes you can make:

Put the phone away 30-60 min before bedtime. Phones emit blue light, a stimulus that slows the production of melatonin and lengthens the time it takes our bodies to feel sleepy. Kids and teens are especially vulnerable to this kind of blue light interference. The best thing to do is keep your phone outside your room at night.

Go to sleep and wake up around the same time every day. Regular bedtimes and wakeup times allow your body to get into a routine and help you wake up refreshed. As easy as it can be to want to study, play games, or talk to friends late into the night, our brains need sleep to process the day and prepare for the next one!

Save your bed for sleep. When we start doing things like watching Netflix and snacking in bed, our brains can have a harder time making the connection between sleep, sleepiness, and our beds. Move the movie nights to the couch so your brain can link sleepiness with your bed.

Create a calming sleep atmosphere. Some suggestions include dimming the lights; some people like blackout curtains. Use a scent diffuser-lavender is a naturally soothing scent. Brown noise has been known to feel like a “weighted blanket for the brain,” although scientific studies have yet to prove its calming effect.

Empathize with your child. Another important practice for parents and caring adults is simply to sympathize with our child/teen’s experience. When situations arise where they are spiraling out of control, again, watch your own reactions, and choose to respond in emotionally regulated, empathetic ways.

Name emotions, ask questions, and reiterate your care. Matching their heightened emotions, responding with threats to ground them, etc., will only teach them that you are not a safe person to come to when they feel out of control. We do not have to agree with the behaviors to validate the feelings that cause them.

Empathy is key. Hebrews 4:15 says, “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin.” In his book Gentle and Lowly, pastor Dane Ortlund examines the use of the word “sympathize”:

The word for ‘sympathize’ here is a compound word formed from the prefix meaning ‘with’ (like our English prefix co-) joined with the verb to suffer. ‘Sympathize’ here is not cool and detached pity. It is a depth of felt solidarity such as is echoed in our own lives most closely only as parents to children. Indeed, it is deeper even than that. In our pain, Jesus is pained; in our suffering, he feels the suffering as his own even though it isn’t… His is a love that cannot be held back when he sees his people in pain.

Note how he emphasizes that though the sympathy of Christ is more complete than any earthly relationship, it is closest to the relationship of parents and children.

The best thing you can do as a parent of a child suffering from anxiety is to empathize-something you are likely already doing without even realizing it. Their pain is your pain in a very real way. Though this might be difficult to communicate to your teen or child, you can show it even without words by being there for them physically with things like hugs and a reassuring presence, or just by making it clear that you are always safe and available for them to process their pain in whatever way they need to.

Let’s get started!

As we’ve been saying, the first step you can take to help your child if they are struggling with anxiety is to start becoming comfortable with your own emotions and seeking healthy ways to emotionally regulate yourself. Parenting is modeling. So how are we modeling dealing with anxiety in our own lives?

Your child’s anxiety is certainly not your fault, but we can help them best by becoming the healthiest versions of ourselves.

One way you can do this is to seek professional help. Though your love is essential in helping them work through and develop health in the midst of anxiety, sometimes a little more support is needed. This might come in the form of individual or family therapy, a clinical diagnosis, or medication.

Most insurance companies have Resource Navigators that are trained in helping families find the right fit for therapists and other medical care. You can request specifics like female counselors, Christian therapists, etc. Make sure to request a therapist who specializes in youth counseling!

No medical or professional treatment your child receives indicates a lack of faith on their or your part. Though we may, and should, pray for God’s healing, sometimes that healing comes through the services provided by professionals.

Think of it this way: if your child had a broken leg, while you should absolutely pray for God’s presence during the process of its healing, you wouldn’t think twice about going to the hospital to get the bones set and the leg put in a cast if needed. Most of us wouldn’t see that as a failure to trust; in fact, the doctors and the technology that allow a person with a broken leg to make a full recovery is a way that God exhibits His healing power. So if your child needs professional help to deal with their anxiety, trust that God is working in their life and can use the therapists, doctors, psychologists, and psychiatrists to bring about healing.

Anxiety, like many other mental health issues, is also tied to our physical health. Nutrition, sleep, and exercise have enormous impacts on our mental health. For example, a recent study showed that eating more fruits and vegetables can lead to lower rates of perceived stress.

For someone who is living with anxiety, it may be a struggle to get good sleep due to racing thoughts, to go to a gym or do group sports because of social anxiety, or even to eat healthy food that might not feel comforting or “safe.” However, despite how hard doing these things might be, it’s essential to find a way to do them.

Ignoring anxiety doesn’t make it better. It usually tends to get worse when we try to avoid it instead of facing it head-on.

With a balance of receiving support, trusting God for help, and taking responsibility for our own growth and symptom management, even people with the most severe anxiety disorders-or other mental illnesses-can live fulfilling, stable lives.