Experts tell parents how to help their kids through their anxiety

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My 11-year-old son knows how he will respond to a school shooting.

His plan, which he told me recently after his school’s latest lockdown drill, is to jump out of a window and make a run for it. We sat in my bed for an hour past bedtime, talking about and navigating his anxiety together.

It’s not just mass shootings that worry him. His mind fixates and overthinks what’s happening in his personal life and what he absorbs from the outside world. That chaos has a way of invading his peace, and soon I know we will have another midnight worry session.

What is happening between my son and me isn’t unusual. A lot of our kids are still struggling with their mental health, and parents are concerned.

“We have an influx of information, and all of these things together create a lot of anxiety that is just built into the culture,” said Maria Evans, who coauthored the book “Raising Calm Kids in a World of Worry: Tools to Ease Anxiety and Overwhelm” with Ashley Graber. Evans and Graber are licensed marriage and family therapists and parenting coaches.

I talked to them about helping our kids navigate through a world that seems to get more chaotic every day.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

CNN: You created a parenting strategy called SAFER to help parents and their kids with anxiety. What is it?

Maria Evans: SAFER is a framework for parents to use that’s based on therapeutic tools. Set the tone. Allow feelings to guide behaviors. Form identity. Engage like a pro. Role model. It’s a very simple guideline for parents to follow to mitigate anxiety in their kids over time.

Ashley Graber: It sets up the different foundations that we know help in every area for a child, for parents and the whole family. Each letter (of SAFER) is part of what we are trying to help parents set up at home and set the stage for psychological safety.

CNN: How can parents recognize when their children have anxiety?

Evans: Some of the most common (physical) symptoms that we see are upset stomachs, difficulty breathing or a little bit of shaking. We see kids who are twirling their hair or tapping or biting their nails. You may notice that your child is picking at their face a lot, and then it might move to something else a few weeks later.

Graber: Then there’s a regression in something. A child may have been able to do something one day and then not (the next day). There could be a worry that all of a sudden came up about something that doesn’t seem to be attached to anything that makes sense.

The other two really big behavioral signs of anxiety that we see all the time is separation anxiety, or fear of being away from a parent, and then avoidance. There can also be social anxiety as a whole slew of different fears.

CNN: How can parents set a calm environment when they don’t feel calm?

Evans: We talk about finding small moments of calm wherever you can get them. So, if that means you’re overall feeling shaky inside, can you find a moment where you sit down and look around the room and find just a small window of a break from the turmoil? It can be small enough to walk up to your child and share a five-minute moment with them, and they can see that your nervous system is regulated and ready to be with them.

We teach lots of tools in the book about how to access that place (of calm) despite the world around us and all of the tasks of parenthood. When you’re trying to set the tone, it’s about a moment, and it’s also about a bigger picture (creating a habit of communication.)

Graber: If we practice these small moments over time, when we go to do it (in times of stress), the nervous system, our body and our mind will connect in these moments. And we’ll start to feel calmer more often.

CNN: How can parents avoid passing our anxieties onto our children?

Evans: We talk about safe framing versus scary framing. This is a term that we came up with to help parents understand that the way that they talk about how they view the world greatly impacts the way that kids see the world.

We guide parents to examine the places in their lives where they feel the most anxiety, the most anger or the most frustration — then learn to temper those reactions and that framework in front of their kids. That makes a huge difference because it cues kids into a world that is safer than one where a parent is telling them to look out for every danger.

CNN: What is co-regulation, and how can parents use it?

Graber: Co-regulation is using somebody else’s calm. If a child is feeling anxious and worried, they can use somebody else’s calm to help them calm down. We do this in therapy rooms and in coaching rooms. We help them by cueing that we’re breathing and showing that without saying something to them.

Co-regulation allows a person on the other side to grab that calm and bring them down. It’s so important for parents because they can do the things that we recommend and set the tone and give that calm to their child to help them calm down in a moment of worry.

CNN: How can parents practice self-empathy and teach it to their children?

Evans: Most parents are exceedingly hard on themselves. This has only increased over the years with all of the parenting advice that inundates them.

We like parents to notice their internal voice. Ask yourself: How often am I saying negative things about myself? This is important because oftentimes those internal thoughts come out loud in front of kids.

Try and flip the script and say something positive or don’t say anything at all. This comes up a lot with body image, especially where parents will be hard on themselves about their bodies. So really being mindful of how you talk about yourself is very important, not only for your development but for modeling for your kids.

Graber: What were the things that we might have heard growing up that we get in our minds? In those moments when you notice that there’s a negative voice inside your head, have some awareness of it. Doing these mindful practices (helps you) be objective about that voice and sometimes seeing it as the voice of other people, not yourself. When you start to notice that, you can put into practice a more compassionate voice.

CNN: How do we help our children through overthinking and fixation?

Graber: When a child is overthinking or fixated on something, allow them to have their feelings about it rather than stopping those but also hold a boundary around it.

One of the tools we talk about is having a time to worry, having a time to overthink. It’s like office hours. You could have an hour during the day when the child can sit and think about these things. Outside of that time, help them to move out of it.

Evans: With intrusive thoughts, we like to tell kids to have a good relationship with their brains in terms of understanding that sometimes their brain sends thoughts to them that are unwanted. And you can call that a sticky thought. If you can label that thought and go, “Oh, I’m having that sticky thought again.”

By labeling it and noticing it, it’s giving it a little bit of distance. Just imagine the thought on a cloud and imagine it moving — that gives you so much more power over your thoughts. Then you recognize that thoughts come and go, and you get to decide what gets filtered through rather than it happening to you all the time.

Shannon Carpenter is a writer, author of the book “The Ultimate Stay-at-Home Dad” and married father of three.

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