The Whole Parent Podcast
The Whole Parent Podcast
Helping Kids Overcome Anxiety #008
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As we tuck our little ones into bed, stories of monsters under the bed aren't just tales, they're a window into the real fears that grip their hearts at night. From nighttime anxiety to social anxiety and more, today's episode peels back the curtain on the shadows of childhood anxiety.
From the evolutionary instincts that wire our kids for caution to the pressures of a world amplified by social media, we navigate the ocean of their worries, anchoring you with the tools you need to help them sail smoothly into dreamland.
Our journey takes us beyond the nightlight, into the depths of bedtime routines that nurture a sense of security and lay the groundwork for resilience. We discuss the power of connection and the magic of a consistent wind-down that cues their little bodies for rest.
But it's not just about the night; we reveal the importance of a growth mindset in broad daylight, equipping our children with the mental armor to face academic challenges and social jungles with the courage of a lion. We're not just fighting shadows; we're building a fortress of self-belief and confidence for the days ahead.
No parent should bear the weight of their child's anxiety alone, and this episode stands as a testament to that belief. We acknowledge when it's time to seek the compass of a professional, ensuring you know that reaching out is a beacon of strength, not a signal of defeat.
So, join us as we share stories, strategies, and a sprinkle of personal anecdotes, with the hope that together, we can turn the tides of childhood anxiety into a journey of growth for our children and for us as parents. Welcome to a conversation that promises to be as nurturing for you as it is for your little ones.
Being afraid of the dark is an evolutionary survival instinct for all of us. Many of us can overcome it because we have fully developed brain that can overcompensate for our you know, inbuilt anxiety about the dark. Right you? This is when you're walking through the dark basement and you're like you get kind of spooked or freaked out and you feel like you run and run across the basement but you really really force yourself to keep walking slowly because there's nothing to be afraid about. That's your orbital medial prefrontal cortex, telling your limb, vix system, which is the thing that's giving you the spook, the scare. It's telling it, hey, you know what? You don't need to be scared right now, but it is overriding something that is more primal and your child does not have that ability.
Jon @wholeparent:Hello and welcome to the whole parent podcast. My name is John. I am whole parent on social media, everywhere that you can find me, and this podcast is all about helping you, the parents of the world, to raise resilient kids, psychologically healthy kids, and do so with confidence. There's so much information out there swirling around about parenting and I am just like you, I am just a dad, but I take that information in. I know just enough to separate the good, the good advice from the not good advice, and then we come on here and we talk about it. So today we are talking about a hot topic, a big topic in mental health circles. We have never been in a time where more people have experienced this in known human history, and that is anxiety. But specifically in this case, how do we help our kids who have some anxiety? And so, before I answer any of the questions, I want to specify here that in this episode, at first and foremost, I am not a psychologist, I'm not a psychiatrist, and so, as far as helping people work through anxiety disorders, I do not have experience with that. I have counseled people who are working with one of those people, one of those professionals, to go through their anxiety disorder, and I've talked to them about that and worked with kids who are doing the same. But I am not giving advice today about things like general anxiety or anxiety disorders.
Jon @wholeparent:Today what we're talking about is what's called situational anxiety. So in situational anxiety these are things that you know anxiety is actually a positive. This is kind of a side note, but I'll do this in the beginning of the episode so that I don't have to say it later. But anxiety is a biological mechanism by which our limbic system keeps and our memory, specifically our amygdala, keeps humans, us alive. And so anxiety is a feature, not a failure, of human evolution and human biology, and it's designed to keep us alive.
Jon @wholeparent:And so situational anxiety are those times when our anxiety, our natural defense mechanism for keeping us alive, anxiety is triggered by something that oftentimes it is unnecessarily triggered by. So if you have situational anxiety while you are being, you know in, chased by a tiger, I guess that wouldn't really be, that would be more like fear. But if you have situational anxiety that you might be chased by a tiger and you are in a part of the world where there is a tiger on the loose and you know that tiger to be in your area, that's probably good Situational anxiety trying to keep you alive. And so anxiety itself is not the situational anxiety I should say, is not the villain that we make it out to be oftentimes, but it can kind of wreak havoc on us, and I know this personally because I struggle with anxiety just myself. I have kids who struggle with anxiety.
Jon @wholeparent:Not, I'm not talking about any of my kids today. I'm talking about the kids that we have questions from, or the parents of the kids that we have questions from, but I think that's an important thing to say. You know, this is, this is a societal epidemic. Anxiety is seemingly constantly increasing. We can hypothesize about why that is whether it's the access to, you know, the increased access to information in the modern world that we just see so many more things that our bodies and our brains are not really evolved to handle that much information. And so our response is anxiety. It could be social media, it could be all sorts of things, but we're not talking about the rise of general anxiety as it relates to anxiety disorder, say, we're talking about situational anxiety with kids, and how do we help kids when they get nervous? How do we help kids when they get anxious? And so we have three questions today. The first one is about bedtime, the second one is about academics and tests, and the third one is social anxiety, and so we're going to kind of cover all three of those things as best as we can. And just you know, with the caveat that because I'm not a psychologist, I'm not diagnosing anything today.
Jon @wholeparent:Any advice that I give make sure that you clear that with your mental health provider. If you have a child who is getting mental health treatment for anxiety or an anxiety disorder. Okay, so the first question comes from Amanda. She says my child's name is Sophia. She's five years old. Lately, sophia has been experiencing a lot of fear and anxiety, especially around bedtime Common time to experience anxiety. She is afraid of the dark and has frequent nightmares. It's affecting her sleep and overall well-being. Can you offer some advice on how to help a young child like Sophia over, overcome nighttime fears and anxiety? I can, and the first thing that I would say is I will redirect you back to I think I already have done the episode on bedtime, conquering bedtime battles, and so if you go back and you look, a lot of the things that I'm going to say here are referenced much more extensively in that episode, where that's the whole episode is about that.
Jon @wholeparent:But the first thing I want to say is that anxiety around the dark and nighttime is one of those places where our bodies have inbuilt evolutionary survival mechanisms like being afraid of the dark, being afraid to be alone at night, that historically speaking and when I talk saying historically, I'm not just saying in the history of civilization, but in the history of humankind has really been a good anxiety to have. We only recently have begun to have the level of safety because of infrastructure whether it's your home and the locks in your doors, and all that in a roof over your head that have provided us a safe place to sleep outside of a group. Humans are inherently social creatures. We have always been tribal creatures. That means that we are always in groups. We are high brain social apes and because of that we like to be in groups. And so when a five year old is alone, they are especially at night. When think when it's dark, it is scary and it is no like noticeably disconcerting.
Jon @wholeparent:And I just want to also kind of destigmatize this for a second to say you asked me how can I help a young child like Sophia overcome night time fears and anxieties? How about? How can I help all of us overcome night time fears and anxieties? I don't know about you, but I definitely have people in my life. My wife is one of them, although I don't know if she wants me to share this, but she does not like sleeping alone. When I'm out of the house, when I'm gone on some trip or something for work, she doesn't. She's like I get terrible sleep when you're not around, and so just understand this is a normal human thing, and so don't demonize it, don't, you know, belittle it. This is a normal feeling and one of the. You know.
Jon @wholeparent:The first quick and dirty solution that I have for you is use a nightlight and make it less dark. You know, there's a lot of really positive benefits to just having a nightlight in your child's room. Now, does it lead to deep sleep? If the nightlight is too bright, can it affect sleep Absolutely? Can it lead to more frequent wake-ups at night?
Jon @wholeparent:Sure it can, but it also can help a child fall asleep when they're feeling anxious at the beginning of the night, and so kind of the hack for that is that you just go to wherever your local hardware store is and go find a little timer, and the best kind to get are the kind that are kind of like wind-up timers, so that it's like an egg timer, so that it can. You don't have to like set it to go on and off at the exact same time every day. But, you know, set it for 20 minutes or 30 minutes or however long it takes your child to fall asleep it could be an hour, it doesn't matter right, and set it on and then when it'll turn off at night and try and get lights that are not super blue like daylight bulbs, that blue light can affect kids and all of us. It's why you're not really supposed to look at your phone before you go to bed or watch a lot of TV before you go to bed, although a lot of us have kind of conditioned ourselves to do that anyway, even though it's not necessarily good for us. But a soft, you know, warm nightlight can go a long way, and so that's the first thing that I want to say about the anxiety around that, and this kind of is a perfect segue.
Jon @wholeparent:It's perfect to start with anxiety around nighttime and sleep, because it really is. It may feel to us like a silly fear, like, oh, you're afraid of the dark. You're such a little kid. Your ancestors who were afraid of the dark was ones that survived. The ones who weren't afraid of the dark are the ones who walked into dark caves and got eaten right or or fell down a cliff or something. Being afraid of the dark is an evolutionary survival instinct for all of us. Many of us can overcome it because we have fully developed brain that can overcompensate for our you know inbuilt anxiety about the dark right.
Jon @wholeparent:This is when you're walking through the dark basement and you're like you get kind of spooked or freaked out and you feel like you run and run across the basement but you really really force yourself to keep walking slowly because there's nothing to be afraid about. That's your neocortex, or specifically your prefrontal cortex, more specifically your orbital medial prefrontal cortex, telling your limbic system, which is the thing that's giving you the spook, the scare. It's telling it hey, you know what, you don't need to be scared right now, because I know the factors and I know that there's likely not a real risk here. But it is overriding something that is more primal and your child does not have that ability. Sophia, at five years old, just simply does not have that ability yet to override that. A child at five years old who could override that I would have other questions about. And so I'm not saying that you can't do frequent check-ins. That's another one, that's another great example of something that we can do. But that's first piece of advice. The second piece of advice yeah, I should get to the check-ins here in a minute. I should spend more time on that. But the second piece of the advice for this is and this again comes from the episode on bedtime battles Definitely go and listen to that one, but if this is something that you're struggling with, listening to this right now.
Jon @wholeparent:But creating a bedtime routine is hugely, hugely effective, because bedtime routines this is just in a nutshell. I'm not going to go into all the details here. But a bedtime routine of doing the exact same thing every night creates a biological mechanism in your child's brain to release sleep hormones in anticipation of going to sleep, and so they'll just get more tired before they lay down. And so children often feel anxious at night, partially because they're not really very tired when they're laying down. Now, some kids will just be anxious regardless, right, don't hear me say that that's always the answer.
Jon @wholeparent:But creating a comforting bedtime routine, something where there's, you know, connection with you and that's another huge one here the bedtime routine has to include connection with you. It can't be something that they do all on their own Can create an environment where the sleep hormones start flowing and then again end that with that really deep connection. Lay next to your child for a period of time, or make sure that you spend time reading books with them, or something you know, singing them a song. Whatever it is for you that works for your child, amanda, with Sophia, whatever it works, do that, provided that it's a routine that you can consistently do and you can. There's pieces and times for connection built into that routine. It's also just good for secure attachment, to connect with your child before sleep.
Jon @wholeparent:We did an episode on what was the episode where we talked about the secure, the nine minutes. I think it was probably the one on new babies, where we talked about the secure attachment, that the connecting with your child before your older children, before bedtime, is a way to kind of boost their attention, the attention that you're giving to them, maximizing the best times of the day. This is one of the best times of the day and so some of the anxiety literally just comes from being away from us, not just of the dark, it's just being away from us. And so, you know, fill up their cup right before they go to bed, not their water cup, because you don't want them peeing all night. That's a whole other, separate episode. But fill up their emotional cup, actually show up in a big way and not on your phone, not, you know, half there, half still working, half still responding to emails. No, be fully present, even if it's just for five minutes. Five minutes is enough for that. Make the bedtime routine longer than five minutes, but make that deep connection, at least five minutes of that. That's totally just you and your child connecting.
Jon @wholeparent:And then the last piece I know that we're spending a long time on this question, but you know it's just kind of. We're also talking about generalizing situational anxiety, and so I think that's important to do. The last piece here is to really leverage creativity and storytelling and imagination, and that might not make a lot of sense, but your child's imagination is the thing in this case. It will really in most cases of situational anxiety. Your child's imagination is the thing that's causing them the anxiety. They're thinking about the future, what could happen, and because they have such an active imagination as a child which is brilliant, I mean it's amazing. It allows them to be creative problem solvers and critical thinkers in ways that most of us adults only dream of being.
Jon @wholeparent:But that really palpable imagination and ability to creatively think also lends itself to be able to come up with really horrifying things, and I mentioned this in the bedtime episode too, but with nightmares, but. But you know the some of the stuff that my child has told me that he's worried about at night. Man, if I was thinking about that, I'd be worried too, and so, instead, use those storytelling and imagery as stories where Sophia gets to defeat her fears. And so what's your fear? Your fear is and this is like no kid's fear in the year 2024, but your fear is a dragon. Okay, well then, let's make the dragon silly or let's slay the dragon in some way. Let's win the battle, whatever that looks like.
Jon @wholeparent:And if you have these positive images and vivid storytelling and creative thinking and imagination, it actually allows your child a venue for which they can conquer their fears in their own head, which is, by the way, where all of us have to conquer our own fears in our own heads. Right, we think about like conquer my fear of skydiving when I went skydiving. No, you conquered your fear of skydiving when you were standing at the edge of the plane and your brain told you to jump, even though you weren't quite sure about it. Right, you always conquer your fears in your head and then you act those things out in the world, and so you can do that with your child. You can have them, help them to conquer their fears in their head, overcoming those fears and fostering really amazing bravery. And, by the way, if you're wondering if this can then translate to them being able to be more resilient long term, yes, absolutely. When we build those neural pathways and we teach our child these coping techniques and skill building around those types of fears, then we get to be you know, they get to be adults someday who have practiced at that.
Jon @wholeparent:And, man, you know, I very rarely complain about my own parenting. I think my parents did a really, really amazing job in so many ways, and especially given number one, what they were given, but also what was available to them, is related to research and all that other stuff. You know what information was even out there for them to consume. They did a really amazing job, but one of the places that I really wished my parents could have done better was in helping build neural pathways around conquering anxiety with imagination and things like that. I mean, it sounds so woo-woo, but like this is what therapy has taught me, right? This is not. This is not what, like, instagram has taught me. This is like what. Like going to a licensed clinical psychologist on a weekly or bi-weekly basis has taught me, and this is so, so important that we can do that. So those are my kind of general tips about nighttime scares, and now I want to jump over into anxiety around school.
Jon @wholeparent:So this comes from David. He says my child is Max. He's age seven. Max has been struggling with anxiety, particularly when it comes to school. He gets extremely anxious before tests, presentations, and it's starting to impact his academic performance. As a parent, I want to help him manage this anxiety better. Do you have any tips on how to support a child like Max with dealing with school-related anxiety? Yes, I absolutely do, david. Thank you for this question.
Jon @wholeparent:This is something that so many kids struggle with and it's something that we really don't talk about very much in in society, in culture. I have many teachers in my life. You know, just by nature of what I do, but also by nature of just the fact, that a lot of my friends are teachers. A lot of my best friends are teachers all the way from elementary school, all the way through high school and even college professors, and they talk about the rise of anxiety related to academic performance all the time that kids are just. They've never felt more anxious. A lot of these people have been doing these jobs for 15, 20, even 30 years, and they're saying that I've never seen a post-COVID world kids with more anxiety than kids have today, and so I really appreciate this question. The first thing that I would say is that so much of school-related anxiety and performance anxiety in general, so this can also go somewhat towards athletic performance anxiety or musical performance anxiety or artistic performance anxiety.
Jon @wholeparent:A lot of performance anxiety comes from children placing their value in what they can accomplish rather than placing their value in their intrinsic worth, and so one of the things that I say over and over and over and I don't actually probably the place I say the least is on this podcast is that children are worthy hear that word worthy of respect, dignity, love and belonging, for no other reason than that they are a human being. Hear that again. Children are worthy as full humans of respect, dignity, love and belonging, simply by virtue of the fact that they are humans. And so continuing to foster a culture in your home where you're not Only lavishing praise, love, attention on your child when they perform well, but also simply just delighting in your child, just being excited to see them, even when the thing that you're excited to see them about has nothing to do with any sort of thing that they've done can be so, so helpful.
Jon @wholeparent:I cannot tell you the number of kids raised in the 90s like me, and you know the world is just a different place. Kids are trying to measure up against social media. Now it's a totally different. So the anxiety can feel much worse, even though the parenting is probably not any worse. The parenting might be a lot better as far as the things that we're talking about, but the metric might come back. But the kids are more anxious because they're exposed to more or whatever. But just to say that, I know so many people who are deconstructing the way that they were parented as adults who are in their 30s, because their parents only really cared about them or seemed to care about them. Their parents probably universally and unconditionally loved them, but their perception was my parents only care when I do something positive, my parents only care when I get a good grade or whatever. So decentralizing that in the way in which you communicate with your child is so, so, so important, of course, you know.
Jon @wholeparent:The next thing I could say here is that you could help them prepare for tests and presentations. You could do practice sessions in your own home. Yes, all of that is really good. I'm not going to go into that because that's Maybe this is just a bad thing for me to say right here, but that feels obvious that you know, doing trial runs is good for kids. I guess I shouldn't say it's obvious. Maybe not obvious for many people, or even for me two or three years ago. But yeah, do all of that as well. But the next thing I want to jump to really quickly is you know, after you're doing fostering that inherent intrinsic value we call that being internally validated rather than externally validated. It's not the things that you do, it's the person you are that is valued, and the things that you do are not a reflection necessarily of the things that you are. When you make mistakes, that are not reflections of the person and the inherent value that you have. So that, going through the practice runs, yes, absolutely. I'm going to kind of gloss over that because we didn't have a lot of time.
Jon @wholeparent:But the next one would be to teach deep breathing and guided imagery or meditation when those anxiety feelings arise. And so I love the way that I've heard many therapists and many child psychologists talk about this, which is to actually leverage what's called a neural network, and so neurons are firing in your brain. They're making connections all the time. This is especially true for children especially, especially especially true for toddlers and teens, but for children as well, you're constantly making new neural networks. Neurons that fire together, wire together.
Jon @wholeparent:So if you feel a certain way when you're doing a certain thing, then you can kind of reverse engineer that, and so what I mean by that is that when your child is feeling particularly at ease or peaceful a lot of times this can be before bed it can be when they're feeling generally connected to you, when they're laying next to you in bed, when you're cuddling, any other time, right, whenever that's happening, when those positive associations are happening and they feel particularly not anxious or at peace, then practice with your child breathing or meditation techniques, things like deep breathing, like I'm trying to think of the one I forget what it's called. I think of it as vagal breathing because it stimulates your vagus nerve and your parasympathetic nervous system, but basically it's meditative breathing or contemplative breathing. This stuff has been around for literally centuries. It's millennia, right? This stuff has been around for 3000 years. So one way to do that is to breathe in through your nose, hold at the top for a couple of seconds and then breathe out through your mouth slower than you breathe it in. So now you feel like you're listening to an ASMR podcast. But, yeah, that deep breathing, pairing that with a time when they already feel at peace then allows them. If you do that a couple of times before bed, you can have them hold their hand on their chest or on their belly that's a really common way to do this so they can actually feel the air expanding in their lungs and in their belly Doing those things.
Jon @wholeparent:Now, when your child finds themselves in an anxiety producing situation and, by the way, this works for the social anxiety, this works for the bedtime anxiety. This works for especially for Max here, when we're talking about anxiety around school performance, right? So the test pop quiz we didn't prepare, we didn't run through this, we didn't do any of this. What do you do? You feel anxious? What do you do? Hand on belly or whatever meditation technique that works for you or your child, and do that meditation technique that they have previously done when they're feeling particularly at peace. What happens is that emotion was actually tied to that activity in their neural network. In their brain, the neurons were tied together, and so now, by intentionally doing this with your body, you can intentionally kind of engage your parasympathetic nervous system and redirect your thoughts and actions to feel more at peace. And it seems woo-woo but it really really works. And like, we have science into this of the power of contemplative meditation and specifically contemplative breathing on anxiety and how this literally changes people's neural synapses to do this, and so that's a really, really good tip that you can use. And again, feel free to use that tip for those who are looking for any type of anxiety. And this, by the way, that absolutely works on adults too. If you're sitting here going, well, I might get to the name of anxiety, but I sure do. That definitely works on adults too.
Jon @wholeparent:And then the last piece here and this is a much longer conversation, I'm just going to kind of gloss over it here for a second is that we want to foster in our children a growth mindset, and so this is related to any performance-related anxiety. But a growth mindset is a mindset that essentially is defined by the person's belief, deeply held belief, that things like academics, intelligence, skills of life, friendships can grow. They can grow in those areas of their life. So these are not fixed things. You're so good at math. You're only ever going to be so good at math If you foster with your children a growth mindset that instead says no.
Jon @wholeparent:If you foster in your kids a growth mindset that instead says no, I can improve on these areas of my life. I can improve in these aspects of who I am. Then actually, mistakes and failures and even, you know, getting a poor grade on tests or whatever those things our children can be much more resilient against those things because we in the, in a growth mindset paradigm, we learn from our mistakes. We're not judged by our mistakes. So when you simply start reframing mistakes as okay, okay, well, what did we learn from this? Not You're so disappointing or you know you should be so disappointed in yourself, or you need to study harder next time, instead saying okay, well, how can we improve as, as a result of the failure, mistake that that has occurred? Man, amazing things can happen when our kids experience growth mindset.
Jon @wholeparent:And if you're wondering, yes, the academic improvement will come. Kids who foster in some form or fashion Fashion a growth mindset tend to have longer and greater academic success long-term, right. So better academic success long-term, not that that's what I am particularly caring about. An episode about anxiety. Really, it's as far as Academic success we should be looking probably at. Academic success is a lot lower on the metrics that we then we do now, not that it is improvement, that that it isn't important, but it certainly isn't as important as many of us were raised to believe. But but you know If you are saying, well, but I want to make sure that my kids get good grades and stuff, and is this gonna hurt them? No, a growth mindset Definitely helps your kids long term to achieve in all aspects of their life much better.
Jon @wholeparent:I have a huge part in my upcoming book all about this and an example that I use. It's like several pages of a narrative of a time when I employed a growth mindset with kids who were a little older than max and the. The achievement not just not just their way that they felt about themselves, but the actual product that they were putting out in this case it was in a sport was Exponentially higher, in fact far surpassed their peers who were being trained using fixed mindset models. So keep that, keep that in mind, and so if you're looking for academic performance I know that you mentioned this is starting to Impact his academic performance. If you're thinking about that, know that this growth mindset piece, as well as the relaxation techniques and the preparation and just Segmentizing this and having him be internally validated all these things will lead also to increased academic performance. So definitely do that.
Jon @wholeparent:Alright, before we get to the end question the last question from Lisa About her child Jake and his social anxiety. I do want to say, if you have not yet You've heard this a million times who listen to this podcast if you have not yet gone in and rated and reviewed this podcast, you got to do it. You got to do it. It's super, super helpful. I know that we have literally thousands of downloads on this podcast already. We are doing so, so so well, as a, as an early on in its ten-year podcast, we have done amazing, amazing download.
Jon @wholeparent:All right, before we get to Lisa and her child Jake, who's showing signs of social anxiety, I want to give a really quick call out that if you have not yet gone on and rated and reviewed this podcast on whatever Podcast app you're listening on, now is the time to do that. Pause this episode right now. Go into the app and rate and review this podcast. I know that the Overwhelming, overwhelming majority of you have not done this. How do I know that? Because, even though podcast numbers are hard to come by, I know that we're getting Thousands of downloads of this podcast, even though we're not even ten episodes in yet. We're getting thousands of downloads of this podcast every single episode, but we don't have nearly that many reviews and ratings, and so I'm gonna keep saying this until we have enough reviews and ratings. That will help us to reach an even wider audience. So you guys have done an amazing job, especially those who have already done this. You guys are the heroes of this podcast. Right now that you have gotten this message out to so many parents, who are already pouring back into my inbox, sending me emails, reviewing the podcast wherever they can do that, and saying, man, I have, I have benefited so much. Thank you so much for doing this, and all I can say is I turn that back around to those of you who have actually gone and and taken the two minutes that it takes to review this and writer, to rate this and read a review. You guys are the ones who are doing this and and to share it. Right, and that's what I'll say at the end of the episode again but if you have a person in your life who could benefit from any episode of the whole parent podcast, please don't hesitate to share it with them.
Jon @wholeparent:Alright, let's talk about Lisa and Jake, alright? So Lisa says hello, my name is Lisa. My child's name is Jake. He's age five. Jacob's been showing signs of social anxiety. He's been hesitant to participate in group activities, make new friends or even speak up in class. It's affecting his self-esteem and overall happiness. Can you provide some guidance on how to help a child like Jake overcome social anxiety and build confidence in social situations? Yes, I can. Social anxiety is an absolutely normal thing for so many kids to experience.
Jon @wholeparent:You know the old adage that I don't know where the statistic came from, but I I've seen it so many places you think it's got to be true. Or maybe it's just one of those like Mandela effects myths is that people are more afraid. The average person is more afraid of public speaking than death. Getting up and speaking in front of people is very, very scary for the vast majority of people. For some of us, it's exhilarating and fun, but I think that the reason that it's exhilarating and fun for even those of us who it is Positive aspect of our daily or weekly or monthly life as a speaker is because there is an aspect of anxiety to it, right, you never know what's gonna happen, right, and that's why it's so much more engaging to watch somebody do something alive than it is to watch some recording. And I appreciate that you are listening to a recording right now, although I very, very lightly at it. Thus I try and give it you, give it to you as unfiltered as possible. But because there is there is this aspect of what's gonna happen, right, this person gonna get anxious and climb up and not know what to say or do. And so social anxiety is a normal part of human Existence.
Jon @wholeparent:And we started the episode talking about evolutionary survival instincts, and I will say that social anxiety is another evolutionary survival instinct For all of us. We appreciate that we cannot do life on our own now in Modernity, in today's day and age, in the modern world, many of us can basically go through the world. We're doing very, very little social interaction. Now You're probably gonna live shorter life. That's just that's what the research bears out probably not gonna be quite as happy as people who have social Circles and interactions, you're not gonna be as mentally healthy or physically healthy these are all aspects to us but you could potentially live in a primarily isolated, recluse life as an adult.
Jon @wholeparent:Throughout history that is not true. We have needed the social tribe to survive, and, in fact, the way the reason that Homo sapiens it has been hypothesized that the reason that Homo sapiens beat out other sapien or not sapiens, the humanoids like Homo erectus or Homo neanderthalus, is Primarily because we gathered into groups more effectively, and so Social connection is really at the core of our survival instincts, and so feeling like you don't want to do something that might get you ostracized or kicked out of the group is a totally normal thing to feel, and that is your body and your brain trying to protect you based on the historical and and by historical I mean in built Evolutionary survival instincts that it has, and so it is normal to have social anxiety. If you're a person with social anxiety, that just means that you are in touch with your Deep feelings of connection, and so there's a couple things that we can do, though, and the first thing is kind of what I glossed over a little bit with max, but it's practice. How can we help practice our social anxiety skills in Non-threatening social situations, and so one really really great way to do this at home is to do a role-play when you can pretend to be a teacher or a friend or a person out in public and have your child role-play and practice those social interactions with you and they can start very, very simple, right for a five-year-old.
Jon @wholeparent:Five-year-olds have a lot of, you know, capacity for cognitive ability, but it doesn't have to be the. It doesn't have to match their like highest level. You don't have to like throw a curveball at them socially in the moment. This is not an improv exercise where you're trying to, you know, really get the best out of the person on the other side. You can just be kind of a plain vanilla, boring person in that role-play Practice with your child and that can actually increase. There are their feelings of confidence of surrounding social interaction, so the more they they have successful social interactions.
Jon @wholeparent:This is some people are just introverts. I should say that too. There are people who are just introverts and they just they don't get as much out of large social interactions as others. They need time to process those. They need time to go off and think about what's just happened. They may wind up being people for whom they have a couple really close relationships Maybe a partner, a good, good, good friend or a family member but they don't have. They're not a social butterfly. They're not going to have a million relationships with a million different people and that's totally okay to exist in the world, right? That's meeting your child where they are and not trying to make them into something that they're not.
Jon @wholeparent:If you try and make your child into something that they're not, it's always going to go badly for you. It's going to create self-esteem issues and all these other things, and so accepting where Jake is, that's a big piece of this. But practicing social interactions to build that level of confidence is going to be massively helpful for you, and so that would be my number one thing is to use some role play. Number two, beyond that, so this is going to be like a stepped thing, so we're going to start with the role play at home. The next thing that I would do is to encourage and I encourage parents to do this whether your children are struggling with social interactions or not.
Jon @wholeparent:Okay, I'll say that I think that, as much as you can, you should have your child interact with adults out in public whenever possible. And so a great example of this I do homeschool at the library a couple days a week. If my son has a question that the librarian should answer, I don't answer his question, especially if I knew the answer I might. But if he's asking me to go ask the librarian, I will almost always attempt to redirect him to be the one to go ask the librarian. And when you start that at a very young age you know hey, I want to spoon instead of a fork at Noodles Company. That literally happens every time we go to Noodles Company. They always give us a fork and he always wants a spoon. He now knows I can just get up and I can walk up to the counter and I can ask for the spoon. Now he's not like the most socially outgoing person ever, by no means Is he like a hardcore introvert. No, so it might be more challenging for a kid like Jake, but those once we've done the role play at home.
Jon @wholeparent:Sometimes the next less threatening environment is not school, where if you say the wrong thing that's going to follow you. It can just be out in public with strangers and it might seem crazy, but just standing behind them while they are holding their hand while they ask a question to a bus driver or whomever out in public can be really like confidence building Because in all likelihood that adult is not going to respond back really negatively. They might be a little surprised. People don't tend to interact with kids out in public, which is a little crazy. If you look at other countries Norway, sweden, japan that's way more likely that you would interact with a child out in public. In the United States and certain parts of Western Europe that's not really as common. But if you can foster that in your child, the adult is going to play their role pretty well usually. If they don't, you might have to process it with your child, but they'll play their role Well.
Jon @wholeparent:Yeah, of course, here's the spoon right, and then that becomes a notch. Same way the role playing did. This becomes an even bigger notch in their kind of confidence meter where confidence pole where they're like okay, I'm just what am I talking about? Notches in a pole here, notch in their belt, that's the term. Geez, this becomes an even bigger notch in their belt that they hey look, I was able to talk to this grown up out in public and not totally climb up and freeze out and that can feel so, so encouraging, and so just acknowledging and praising that it's like man you really like. You needed that spoon, you went and asked for it. You needed this book on penguins and you went and asked for it. That's great, that's amazing descriptive praise that you can provide your child in those moments to help them to build some of that confidence to overcome a lot of that social you know feelings of nervousness in social situations.
Jon @wholeparent:And the last thing that I'll say here, before we conclude this episode, is that so many things get easier and so many of the hard things in life get easier when you can find, when you can tie it to, an interest that your child has. And so a child who might be really, really difficult to communicate with peers in social situations but has a passion for something, whatever that is right Could be Minecraft, it could be Pokemon I'm just listening to things that my kids are into it could be Daniel Tiger, it could be, you know, video games of some kind. I already said Minecraft. Maybe my kids play too many video games. It could be reading a specific book that they're into, a specific movie that they really like. Whatever it is something that they like to do.
Jon @wholeparent:If you can find them some peer or even better yet, a group that kind of discusses, talks about you know, has conversations around that topic, has social interaction around that topic, then it can feel so much more simple to to feel like you want to participate, right, it's harder to participate in a conversation when you're not massively interested and if you if you ever experienced this with an adult you ever find an adult I'm thinking of so many of my life. I'm not going to out them on my podcast, but I have a family member and a friend who I feel like I've gotten to know a little bit a couple different times, not always in the same room with them, sometimes at family gatherings, but recently we had a family gathering where I was in the same room a lot with them and we started talking about an area of mutual interest and it was like man, I just like was blown away by how much conversation we could talk for hours and hours and hours. Not a person who I would normally think like that's going to be what we're going to do. But when there was something that we were interested in, we shared an interest on, like it was like two extroverts, right, not just like John, likes to talk to people which I do, by the way, if you didn't know that but also this person who, who is a little bit, seemingly more introverted or quiet, was like just ready to have these deep conversations about something that was interesting to them. And so the same is true. You know, I'm not going to give tips on how to teach a child how to read right now, but the same is true there. Right, if you can get your child reading something that they're interested in, it's going to be a lot easier for them to struggle through that difficult phase of learning how to read when they're reading something that they care about.
Jon @wholeparent:Figuring out a way in other you know other aspects of life. This is somewhat. It's just creating positive association around the hard thing. So the hard thing don't just allow the hard thing to be hard with no reward and payoff. Find a way for that to have a payoff by, especially in this case, finding some sort of shared interest, and so it might mean that you need to develop a shared interest with your child, to care about the things that your children care about, whether that's, you know, minecraft or Blu-ray or whatever, to talk to them about that. But whatever it is, if you really find something that they care about, you'll be amazed by how the social anxiety will it still exist? Absolutely. Will your kid absolutely, you know, 100%, not, you know, just totally become an extrovert and you get them talking about something that they want to talk about? No, not necessarily, but it can. It could go really, really a long way.
Jon @wholeparent:And so I wanted to end this episode, before I kind of do our little outro thing where I give you one more chance to show this to somebody who you know, I want to say one thing before we hit the hit the road here. I know this has already been a really long episode, and that last thing is that if you are struggling with a child who has anxiety and all the advice that I've given today seems to just fall short, your child's still massively struggling. You're still. You know everything we said about school your child is still having panic attacks at school. Everything we've said about nighttime your child is still just inconsolable at night, cannot, cannot cope.
Jon @wholeparent:The child who's just so, so, so introverted and not introverted, so, so socially anxious that they will not speak in public under any circumstance and they just get overwhelmed and burned out by those experiences and have meltdowns over it. Feel, totally feel free to go seek professional help. I cannot tell you how encouraging it is when you do run into something like this that a trained specialist can work with. Beyond. That just goes beyond the situational stuff, that just goes into some of the deeper stuff. It can feel so scary to go and seek that help, but I really, really want you to do that if you can or if you're willing, because your child is totally worth it and it is so much less scary than you think it's going to be. So go seek the help that you need. If none of this stuff seems to be landing for you, go get the help that you need and don't feel one negative feeling about that. You were caring for your child and that is what. That is All right.
Jon @wholeparent:We've made it to the end of another episode of the whole parent podcast. I hope the information that you have gotten today has left you feeling like you are more ready, more prepared for your parenting journey. If it has, I really encourage you to not keep that to yourself. To either write a review, as I've already asked you to in this episode, to rate and review this podcast, yes, but also to share this with somebody in your social circles, to share this on social media. How about that? One right that can feel a lot less threatening than sending it to somebody.
Jon @wholeparent:Get out on social media and say, hey, I listened to this podcast, my child has anxiety or maybe they don't, maybe you're just like, yeah, when I was a child, I had anxiety. I feel like these things would really help. Share this with as many people as you can, because this stuff that we're talking about in this podcast really, really can make a difference in people's lives, a profound difference in people's lives when you learn this stuff. That's why I talk about it. I talk about it because it made a profound difference in my life. And so go out, share this with the masses, share this on social media and make sure that you let them know what you're learning from the whole parent podcast. That's all I have for you today, and I'll see you next time.
