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What are some practical steps I can take to encourage my child to tolerate their anxiety

Podcast

Welcome to The Child Anxiety FAQ podcast on YouTube, where we explore practical steps to help your child tolerate anxiety. In this episode, Dawn Friedman, MSEd, shares insightful techniques for parents guiding children through anxious moments. Learn about the importance of educating your child about anxiety, normalizing their experiences, and using creative approaches like externalizing anxiety and giving it a persona. Equip your family with empowering strategies that inspire resilience and flexibility.

00:00 Child anxiety podcast: Dawn Friedman advises on practical steps for parents to help their children tolerate anxiety, emphasizing education about anxiety as a normal reaction.

03:19 Externalizing anxiety as a character helps children and adults manage it. Naming anxiety (e.g., as “Tom”) allows conversation with it, aiding understanding and negotiation.

09:08 Some kids are slow to warm to new experiences; patience helps them adjust at their own pace.

10:26 Take the parenting pitfalls quiz at openbookparenting.com/quiz to assess child anxiety issues.

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How can I determine if my own anxiety is influencing my parenting of my anxious child

Podcast

Welcome to The Child Anxiety FAQ Podcast, where parenting expert Dawn Friedman MSEd dives deep into the complexities of parenting an anxious child. In this episode, “How Can I Determine if My Own Anxiety is Influencing My Parenting of My Anxious Child?” Dawn explores the connection between a parent’s anxiety and their child’s anxiety. Discover the power of interrupting anxiety patterns, whether they originate from your child or yourself, and learn how to tackle avoidance behaviors with confidence.

Gain insights into supporting your child by recognizing and addressing your own anxiety, leaning on psychoeducation, and building strong parent-child relationships amid challenging situations. Discover how to navigate societal judgments, and why a blame-free approach is essential in managing childhood anxiety effectively.

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How do I set limits for my anxious child without feeling guilty

Podcast

Welcome to The Child Anxiety FAQ, where Dawn Friedman, MSEd, addresses your frequently asked questions about child and teen anxiety, helping parents navigate the complexities of raising anxious children. In this episode, Dawn explores the question, “How do I set limits for my anxious child without feeling guilty?” With over three decades of experience in working with children and families, Dawn provides thoughtful insights into building a supportive environment that encourages both growth and independence.

In this episode, Dawn discusses the nuances of parenting guilt, especially when it comes to setting age-appropriate limits for anxious children. Parents often find themselves caught between wanting to alleviate their child’s anxiety and fostering an environment that allows for developmental growth. Dawn highlights practical strategies for setting limits while managing the emotional challenges that accompany these decisions. Learn how to disentangle your own experiences and emotions from those of your child to become a more effective and compassionate parent.

Keywords: child anxiety, parenting guilt, limit setting, anxious child support, developmental growth, emotional resilience

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What does healthy coping with child anxiety look like?

Podcast

In today’s episode I’m talking about what healthy coping really looks like—it’s not always pretty, but understanding this helps us prepare to keep going even when it’s hard. Realistic expectations and an understanding that (to quote Jessica Baird), “Crying is coping” makes it so much easier to power through as we support our kids in overcoming their anxiety. 

Learn more about Jessica Baird and her services at Kids Can Cope http://kidscancope.com

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Is it my child’s anxiety? Or just a preference?

Podcast

 Hi everyone. Welcome to the Child Anxiety FAQ Podcast. FAQ stands for frequently asked questions, and I’m answering listener questions about child and teen anxiety. My name is Dawn Friedman and I have been working with kids and families for more than three decades as a preschool teacher, parent educator, family, case manager, clinical counselor, and now as the owner and operator of Child Anxiety Support, where I help parents of anxious kids.

And this episode’s question is, how do I know if it’s my child’s anxiety or a preference. Specifically, this parent is asking about their child’s avoidance. They understand that anxiety is about avoidance, that we look for the things our child is avoiding because those things make them upset and uncomfortable and we help them figure out how to go towards it.

And this family is wondering, so how do I know if. This is anxiety and something we need to go towards, or is this my child’s preference? In other words, do they just not care for the thing? That’s a good question, and we’re not always going to know the answer, which means we might need to experiment a little bit and our child might need to experiment a little bit.

And actually for this episode, I’m going to use myself as an example because I am an introvert. Meaning I really enjoy my own company. I don’t always want to go to an event where there’s going to be a lot of people. I may not enjoy the kinds of group events that other people enjoy, or I may not always enjoy it.

I may need to protect my capacity a little bit. As a clinical counselor and someone who coaches parents, I do a lot of one-on-one work and that means at the end of a workday, I maybe don’t want to go and hang out with friends. Not ’cause I don’t love my friends, but because I’ve been peopled out and that’s a preference.

However, I also have social anxiety. Which means that sometimes at group events I get really anxious and I struggle with negative feelings and, thinking errors, negative cognitions about social events. And that might look like going, ” probably nobody wants me to come. What if I say something stupid and people get mad at me?

What if I show up and I’m not wearing the right clothes, or I’m not behaving in the right way?” And that’s social anxiety. And again, if I have had a day full of people and I’m a little peopled out, I may have more social anxiety ’cause my coping capacity is also all the way at the edge. Recently I got invited to an event and it’s the kind of event I don’t usually enjoy.

A lot of small talk. A lot of meeting new people, not really clear expectations about what I’m supposed to do or how I’m supposed to behave. And I thought, do I not want to go because that’s not my idea of a great time. It’s got a lot of aspects to it that are not my favorite as an introvert. Introverts tend to not like small talk.

Introverts tend to not like unclear expectations that they can sort of rest on. Introverts don’t necessarily like meeting a ton of new people all at once. Or is this my social anxiety? Because this is an event that is unfamiliar to me with a bunch of new people, and I really wasn’t sure. I decided to err on the side of this is my introversion and when it’s my introversion, I can often go and have fun anyway.

What I ended up doing was going and pushing through my social anxiety to get there. And then once I was there, I realized, “oh yeah, this isn’t really my thing. I’m gonna head home.” I didn’t wanna skip it since I wasn’t sure. Is this social anxiety? Is this my introversion? If it’s my social anxiety, I wanna go towards it. I wanna stretch my ability to do things that are hard for me.

And when I got there, I realized, oh, my introversion is saying this is not a great fit for me. I’m gonna go ahead home. On the other hand, I do a lot of public speaking. Ironically, public speaking can be easier for people with social anxiety because it gives us something to do.

That is a thing I can do. I have a role to play. I’m going to speak and afterwards, I will answer questions and that is a more comfortable way for me to participate. So I I go to these events. I often have a lot of social anxiety before I go, right? Because. Public speaking, anxiety provoking, but I end up having a good time ’cause I really like having that role to play.

I really like knowing what the expectations are and I really like meeting people when it’s not going to be small talk as much. We’re gonna be talking more about the specific topic that we’re all at the conference, four. So for example, I speak a lot at early childhood conferences and I like to hear about people’s jobs as early childhood educators.

I like to hear about their challenges. I enjoy knowing more about them in the context of their work. So that is easy for me to overcome my social anxiety because it’s a good fit for my introversion. Is this making sense? But I have to experiment because I don’t always know. There’s a lot of overlap in introversion and social anxiety, and I try to go towards things because I don’t wanna miss out.

My anxiety encourages me to miss out, but also I am open to learning that it’s just a poor fit for me as a preference.

If you have a child, for example, who doesn’t wanna learn to ski and you say, is this their anxiety? Are they afraid of the risks of skiing? Are they afraid of going downhill quickly?

Are they afraid of not knowing how to do it in front of people? Is there some social anxiety or performance anxiety there, or is it a preference? They don’t like the cold and they don’t like skiing? Well, to figure it out, you may want to look back at other things they enjoy. Is this a child who generally does not like big muscle activities. Who doesn’t like the outdoors? Who doesn’t like winter clothes? Then maybe it’s a preference. On the other hand, is it a child who does like those things? Who likes moving quickly? Who likes building skills? Building athletic skills, then it might be anxiety and it’s worth going towards.

You can ask your child to try things and report back. That’s a big part of what we’re doing with anxious kids is encouraging them to try. So instead of saying to them, try it, you’re gonna love it. Try it it’s gonna be worth it. You can say, you gotta try it to know for sure. So let’s try it and give me feedback as we go.

I’m interested in hearing your experience with it. When I was working with kids clinically, I would talk to them about being anxiety detectives, like, can you see where the anxiety is and where the discomfort is and where it seems worth it to push through. When we’re working on anxiety, I like kids to have some goals for themselves.

Now, you know, in my program, in my child anxiety program, I am working with parents specifically, and I’m not looking necessarily for where the child is motivated. Although it might be part of what we’re exploring when I’m coaching families and talking to them about creating a plan for their kids, but when I’m working with kids about learning some anti-anxiety skills, I’m looking for where they might have motivation, and that’s where they are feeling like they’re missing out. When you’re trying to figure out, is it anxiety or a preference, try to understand. Do they feel like they’re missing out on something? Do they seem to have some regret? Are they pulled towards the thing? If they’re not, it may be a preference. This can be trickier when we’re talking about things like kids sleeping by themselves. They’re often not pulled to that at all and there is preference, but that’s when it’s really important we’re working with parents. ’cause the kids, again, don’t have an interest. It’s all gonna be on the parents. However, for a kid who say wants to learn to sleep by themselves ’cause they really wanna go to a slumber party and they want to deal with their homesickness, which is anxiety about not being home, about being away from their parents. A little separation anxiety, which is a normal thing for kids to work through. They might be more motivated to work through it because they really wanna do that slumber party and that would be a good target for them to work on their anxiety.

So when you’re asking, is it my child’s anxiety or a preference? First of all, it may not matter so much unless you want to use that area to work on their capacity to go towards their anxiety. If you’re not working with them specifically about it, then it’s about, well, what does it mean for the family? If your child is not interested in skiing and you really want the whole family to ski and somebody doesn’t wanna stay in the lodge with them, that’s more complicated, right?

You’re like, so does that mean that we need to create an exposure plan for skiing, or does that mean as a preference, we need to consider their preference about it? That’s a very personal decision, and it has to do with a whole lot of other things going on for the family?

I would say it’s not a great initial target to have. If you are just diving in to anxiety, work with your family skiing or those one-off events are not it.

When we’re doing anxiety work and we’re targeting the family’s Parenting Pitfalls, it’s important to have something that’s happening more regularly than skiing, and unless you ski every single day as a family. Which I guess could happen, although I can’t really imagine a scenario where that’s a thing, it wouldn’t be a great target not to start with.

I would suggest starting at an everyday thing and getting a better understanding of your child in the context of their anxiety, and then looking at these other areas. You’ll have a better idea of how anxiety looks for your child. You’ll have a better idea about unpacking your own expectations for your child, and then when you’re looking for preference or anxiety, you will have more expertise to bring to your observations.

If you have questions specifically about your child, you can head to my website, ChildAnxietySupport.com, check out my programs. See if they’d be a good fit for your family.

And if you’re not sure, schedule a 20 minute consultation with me. Ask me more about what it is that I do. Let me know what’s going on with your kids and I’ll direct you to where you can get the most help. Thanks, and I’ll see you on the next episode. 

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What are some practical steps I can take to encourage my child to tolerate their anxiety?

Podcast
What are some practical steps I can take to encourage my child to tolerate their anxiety?

This week’s question is, what are some practical steps I can take to encourage my child to tolerate their anxiety? This is from someone who’s been listening to the podcast and understands that the goal is not to eliminate anxiety, it is to help our kids tolerate their anxiety, and they said, great. You’ve got my buy in, but how do I do that? I’m gonna give a very general answer that will work across age groups. The way that you implement this will depend on where your child is developmentally and how the anxiety is showing up, but let’s just do this very generally, and hopefully it will help inspire you on how you can support your child who is dealing with anxiety. So the very first step you can take is to educate your yourself and your child on anxiety itself, and basically, that’s to let them know that anxiety is a normal reaction to new situations or unknown situations, and we all experience anxiety.

You can give some examples of a time that you have felt anxiety or nervousness, and I think you can you could talk about, you know, maybe the first time you drove a car, or, you can think about a test you had to take or an interview you were doing for a job. Think about a time when you felt anxious. Your child know, I felt anxious then, and then you can also talk to them about a time that they felt anxious and overcame it. So maybe that’s learning to ride a bike or learning how to swim, meeting new friends, going to a new class, times when they were nervous and say, that’s anxiety. So that’s naming that emotion. If you’ve seen Inside Out 2, you could be talking about anxiety in the context of that movie, or you might have other books, or you could go to the library and ask them for books about kids who have dealt with anxiety. There’s a whole slew of them. Mostly, it’s to help them understand that anxiety is part of being a person, and we all experience anxiety, and it is normal, and that nothing is wrong with them that sometimes they feel anxiety.

So that’s that’s education. It’s normalizing it. And then the next thing is to help them identify when their anxiety is taking over and talking to them. Sometimes that can help by externalizing anxiety, giving anxiety a name, giving an giving anxiety a character. Younger kids might like to draw a picture of their anxiety. They have some toys that are like monsters, anxious monsters or something. You could do that. You could get a toy that looks like, worried or scared or a little bit scary.

I had one child that had one of the characters from Where the Wild Things Are that they used as their anxiety stand in, and that’s to help externalize it so that you can start having a conversation with it. So you you understand that anxiety is an experience you’re having, but it’s an experience that you can play with, that you can negotiate with, and that is easier especially for kids, but sometimes for adults too, if we externalize it as a character. So you might ask your child to give their anxiety a name, and maybe that name would be, I don’t know, Tom. You could name your anxiety Tom, whatever. And so when your child is feeling anxious, you can say it sounds like Tom is really loud in your ear. What is Tom saying to you? What is your anxiety saying to you? And then they can tell you, my anxiety is telling me this is gonna be a disaster, everyone’s gonna laugh at me, I’m gonna hurt myself, I’m gonna be in a car crash, whatever it is. And then we say we need to talk back to Tom. Tom is trying to keep us safe by keeping us small, by limiting our life, by saying, don’t ride the bike because you might crash the bike, but then you’re not gonna have the fun of riding the bike.

So let’s talk back to Tom. And you do this in a really formal concrete way. You do this when your child is not anxious. So you don’t do this when they’re on the bike, not the first time. You do this way ahead of time when they’re just thinking about the bike because their anxiety won’t be as high as when they’re actually doing the thing. So you say, so tomorrow, we’re gonna practice riding the bike. Are are you feeling nervous about it? Is Tom getting really loud about this? And then you have a conversation back with Tom. So Tom says, oh, no.

You’re gonna fall on the bike. And you say, well, you know, Tom, I might fall on the bike, and that’s where I wear a helmet. Or my mom will be right there to patch me up if I skin my knee, or my dad is gonna spot me at the beginning and make sure that I don’t have a really bad fall. Whatever. Just kind of talking back. We’re not trying to reassure their child that absolutely nothing bad will happen because bad things will happen. We can’t promise. We’re just talking about, well, right, we have a plan for that, and good things might happen too.

So Tom is always gonna tell you the bad things that might happen, what good things might happen. You might find out you’re the best bike rider ever. You might find out you love riding your bike. You might find out that you can go down that hill on your bike. You might find out that you fall, and you get right back up. So we’re not trying to eliminate anxiety, that’s not possible. We’re not trying to promise them that everything will be absolutely 100% fine, because that’s not possible either. We’re trying to get them to have some give, to have some flexibility, to be willing to concede that good things might happen.

They don’t have to a 100% believe it. They just need enough room to get on that bike the first time. So that’s educating them about their anxiety, that anxiety is a normal emotion, that most of us have anxiety when we’re trying something new, something for the first time, doing something in a new context, and that we can negotiate it. This is not a perfect science. You might do this with your child and they go, yeah. I am here for it. No way, Tom. I’m gonna get on my bike tomorrow, and they still might have a meltdown tomorrow.

That’s okay. We keep working on it. We keep negotiating it. We can model for them by talking back to Tom, an older kid. They would just be able to say that’s my anxiety, but even older kids sometimes like naming their anxiety and externalizing it. You can do this in really formal ways, like you can write down a script of things you could say to Tom. Your whole family could kind of brainstorm it of and and come up with catch phrases your family uses, like simmer down, Tom, or sit down, Tom, or Tom, enough of your mouth, whatever. Get flippant, get loud, get funny, whatever works for your child, and start practicing it.

Practice it before, practice it during, do not expect this to fit overnight. Your child is really working on creating new ways of thinking, and that’s hard work. That’s hard work. It takes practice. Sometimes when we talk about tolerating anxiety, we talk about calming down. It might be part of what we’re working on. It’s not the 1st place I go because tolerating the anxiety means sometimes revving up. It means feeling it.

It means not necessarily calming down. It’s having the feeling and working through the feeling because it, if we don’t fight the feeling, we don’t try to push it away, often it will crest and then come down. So our anxiety will get worse and worse, and if we hang in there and we tolerate it, let’s say we say to our kid, let’s get on the bike, and your kid completely melts down. If we can just sit there patiently while they cry about it, often, they will eventually get to a place where they’re willing to get on the bike. If we try to fix it, try to make them stop crying, try to talk them back into it, try to get them to negotiate with Tom again, we might cement it. But if we can say, it’s okay, it’s alright, I’ll be here, I’m here with you. You go ahead and cry. Kick your bike tires if you want to.

We we’re in no rush. Often, those kids will eventually be able to come to a place they get on the bike, because one of the temperament traits that is often present in anxious kids, not always but often, is this kind of slow to warm to new experiences. And if we immediately react with, I gotta push you to the new experience, we’re not giving them that time to warm. If you have a child who tends to process things over time, who tends to hang back and observe before they try the new thing, the kid who gets to the park and watches people on the monkey bars before they’re willing to try it themselves, who watches other people put together the toy before they try it themselves, that’s a slow to warm kid. And we can just build that into our expectations that they will be slower to warm and to come to that new experience. It’s not necessarily anxiety, it can be. It can also just be the way that child functions or the way that person functions. If you have a question about child anxiety that you would like me to answer on the podcast, I encourage you to reach out to me at my website, child anxiety support.com.

And if you are concerned about your child’s anxiety, I encourage you to go there and take my parenting pitfalls quiz, and that will tell you whether or not your family is stuck in the very, very, very, very common parenting pitfalls of child anxiety. You can get to that at childanxietysupport.com/quiz. I’ll see you in a couple of weeks.

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How can I involve siblings in our family’s child anxiety management?

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This is a really good question because first of all, siblings are always involved in whatever’s going on with the anxious child.

Our research shows us and my. Experience has shown me that siblings are often caught up in the same parenting pitfalls. Which is to say th at the inevitable patterns created by child anxiety and unintentionally perpetuated by parents are also perpetuated by siblings.

And Sometimes this is because we explicitly ask them to get involved, like, help your brother do this thing or let your sister go first. Do you know how scared she gets? But it also happens because siblings also care about siblings and they will do things to protect their siblings. And sometimes sibling conflict also creates patterns of avoidance.

Anxiety is challenging for the whole family. It does create conflict between parents, between siblings. There’s a lot of tension. Worry feels like tension and irritability. And so it’s no surprise that siblings get just as trapped as we parents do. So how do we involve them? First thing we need to do is make sure we understand what family patterns are being perpetuated in our family.

And the easiest way to do that is to go to my quiz, the Parenting Pitfalls Quiz, which is right on the front page of my site childanxietysupport.com. Actually, if you do openbookparenting.com, it’ll take you there more quickly. That’s the URL I’m using now. But if you go there, you can take the quiz and the quiz will highlight areas where you are likely to get stuck.

The quiz is based on a couple of different assessments that we use clinically. Obviously, this is not a clinical measure. And it’s just a descriptor of where we are likely to get stuck, and then your score will tell you how stuck you are. Hopefully though, as you take the quiz, it’s gonna give you some insight into what’s happening in your family.

There’s probably things you’re doing that you didn’t know were pitfalls. But as you’re taking the quiz, I want you to notice where siblings are involved. Are there times that you are asking a sibling to step aside to go first or go last to give up the way they want something done in order to give in to another sibling’s big demands.

An example of this would be a child who went ahead and grabbed the red cup and the one anxious kid goes, no, that’s my lucky red cop. And you know, I have an exam later. Mom tell them I have to have the red cup. It can be something like that. It can be something like letting that child kind of fend for themselves

’cause you’re so busy trying to manage the child that is struggling. You might start feeling guilty as you realize the way the parenting pitfalls have impacted other kids in the family. And I get that. I totally get that. Sometimes even the anticipation of guilt or kind of knowing in the back of your head, this doesn’t seem fair, makes us less likely to look at what’s going on.

So let me point out that guilt is a tool. It’s only useful if it gives us insight into how things might be different. I’m not a big fan of guilt. I am a big fan of knowing what’s going on, of saying, oh my gosh, I could be handling this better. What will I do to address that? But I’m not a big fan of, I’m the worst parent ever.

It’s not helpful. It’s not helpful for you, it’s not helpful for your child. And we’re all doing things that we could do better, and we’re constantly negotiating that. And that includes when we have an anxious child. It is an opportunity to learn. Back to the question, the first thing you do to get the other sibling involved is to get them uninvolved of the parenting pitfalls.

Get them out of those parenting pitfalls. Figure out how you can get eyes on the sibling who is not struggling and figure out what kinds of supports they need. Siblings are always aware of each other and aware of when somebody is doing something better or worse, and aware when a parent is giving more or less attention.

It’s just the nature of sibling hood. You don’t need to be fair. You just need to be as just as you can. And what’s the difference there? Fair is everything’s equal. Everything matches. It’s just not possible. Kids are all different. They have different needs just is: People are getting more or less what they need as well as we are able to provide, and that’s what we’re gonna look at here.

Are people getting what they need? Does your non-anxious sibling need some attention around that? Have you ever talked to them, not about their sibling’s anxiety as in let’s discuss your sibling’s anxiety and discuss how we all feel about it, because that’s a little bit like gossip, but more like you know that your sibling has

tended to get more attention from us ’cause of their anxiety. And I’m wondering how you’re feeling about that. Are you feeling like your needs are getting met? Is there something you would like to see that would be different? Less about criticizing the sibling and more about sharing with me what’s going on for you around that?

Now some siblings get a lot of pleasure out of being the helper. They like being able to help the family and help the sibling. They may have an identity as someone who does the thing, is super responsible, is super at hand, and that can be great and it can also be a burden. So it’s something to examine.

If we ourselves had siblings growing up, we may consider where were we in the sibling lineup? Were we someone who got a lot attention or not enough attention? What was the conflict like between siblings, if there was any? 📍 What were the responsibilities with different siblings and how did that feel to you?

Just because it can be helpful to then look and say, am I enacting patterns that I learned as a child? And are these patterns still helpful for my family? Or are they a struggle? Am I reacting to things in such a way that I’m actually creating problems? Again, not about guilt and blame. More about insight.

An example I’ll give of this is a family that I was working with and one of the parents had grown up with a sibling with a lot of difficult behaviors due to some unaddressed mental health issues. I don’t really remember the diagnosis. I don’t really remember the details. I just remember that this was a pattern in one of the parents’ family of Origins.

Remember, we always use the name Joan on here? Since I don’t know anyone named Joan and have yet to work with anybody named Joan, so we’ll give this parent the name of Joan. Anyway, Joan was very, very concerned that she not reenact this pattern because she felt so shunted aside because of the incredible needs of this particular sibling.

When this parent, Joan, looked at the way things were going with her anxious child and her other child, she realized she had mistakenly recreated that pattern. That the anxious child’s anxiety had become so present for the family that everything else was shunted aside. Including the sibling. So this parent in an effort to make sure that any mental health needs that she was concerned about were being addressed, had actually created a very similar relationship even though her child did not have the kind of mental health issues that the other sibling had had in her family of origin.

But Joan’s outsized and understandable concern about it led her to be very entrenched in the parenting pitfalls to the point that the anxious child sibling was getting shunted aside. This was something once she realized she was able to go and get her own therapy around it, while we continued to work on how to help the anxious child deal with their anxiety and how to create a plan, an exposure plan.

A confidence and competence plan. To work on that. This is something that can happen too. When we’re doing work on being the parent that we are meant to be and that our children need, we may discover that we have some unaddressed issues from our family of origin and that can inspire our own therapy and work.

It’s really important that gets its own space away from the work that we’re doing with our anxious child. Certainly it’s a place that we can say, Hey, this is going on for me, but the healing that we need to do is best done in its own space with a good therapist who understands what you’ve been

through and understands the work that you are trying to do.

So the best way to involve a sibling in the child anxiety management is to get the sibling out of the child anxiety management. Of course, family patterns of anxiety, they are already in it, but we’re gonna try to move them out of it . They can’t help but be impacted even as we do the work.

But again, one of our goals is that that child does not have to be a caretaker, does not have to make tons of allowances, is able to get their own needs met, even if their needs don’t seem quite as big and as pressing as their anxious siblings needs. And that’s all complicated stuff. But I have faith in you and I know that you will be able to do it.

Again, I encourage you go take that parenting pitfalls quiz, see how entrenched your family is or isn’t, and use that to guide you and inform you as you move forward in figuring out how to help your anxious child and how to help your family, and even how to help yourself. If you have a question you’d like me to address on the podcast, just post it here.

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