How to help your teen with anxiety

In this blog we hear from Grace who shares her experience of living with anxiety, and how her parents helped support her through her teenage years.

I was a teen with anxiety and before that I was an anxious child.

I was formally diagnosed with Generalised Anxiety Disorder when I was 14 and there is no escaping the fact that it was not only a difficult period for me, but also for my parents.

It may seem obvious, but if you’ve never experienced anxiety it can be hard to understand how real it feels to the person experiencing it.

However, there are still ways you can help your child. Here are some things my parents did which helped me.

Celebrate the small things because they can feel huge to your child.

One of the big triggers for my anxiety was travel. There were just too many variables that I couldn’t control. Would there be traffic? Would we end up stuck somewhere for hours? What if the car broke down? At its worst, I couldn’t even travel for longer than 20 minutes.

10 years on, travelling long distances doesn’t make me nearly as anxious and I’m far more confident with driving. I’m even able to get in my car and drive somewhere I haven’t been without doing the journey multiple times beforehand. This might seem like something you wouldn’t even think twice about, but to me this has been a big step that took an awful lot of practice.

I’m sure most of my peers took to the road and never looked back as soon as they passed their driving test. Even my younger brother was driving more confidently than me when he passed his test four years after I did. It’s disheartening to feel like you’ve been left behind, but I’ve learnt to be proud of the progress I make.

It was helpful when my mum took everything back to the smaller steps. Going for a drive to school and then driving home. Helping me get on the bus and meeting me a couple of stops later where I would get off. Keeping her phone with her in case I needed her.

The steps might be smaller but that doesn’t make them any less important. So, celebrate your child’s ‘big’ small steps – a hug and an acknowledgement that what they just did was difficult can go a long way.

Your child might feel embarrassed or ashamed. This is natural.

When I was first diagnosed, my anxiety was a closely guarded secret.

I was now different to my friends and in secondary school the last thing you want to be is different. I felt embarrassed.

But keeping my anxiety so close to my chest made it more difficult. It built my anxiety up to be this huge black cloud hanging over me which, in turn, made the anxiety worse.

There is a natural point when we move out of adolescence and begin to realise that there is no such thing as ‘normal’ and everyone around us has something complicated in their life. Starting to understand this helped me to accept my anxiety as part of me and let go of some of the shame that surrounds it.

Until your child starts to reach this point it can be helpful to offer them the chance to talk about their anxiety. Be mindful that they might not want to talk and that’s OK too. Let them know you’ll be there if and when they want to have a conversation.

This shame can also sometimes make it harder to seek professional help. It’s as if admitting you’re struggling, or talking to someone, or getting medication means that there is something ‘wrong with you’. This is so far from the truth, but it can take time to understand this, particularly for a teenager.

As their parent you could reach out to mental health professionals yourself, get some advice and read books on the subject. I know that during the worst points, when I wasn’t ready to do this myself, it was helpful that my parents did the research instead. The more you learn, the better placed you are to be there for your child.

It will get better, and then it might get worse, but then it will get better again.

I’ve realised that my anxiety isn’t going away so I need to find ways to live with it. When my anxiety was at its worst I couldn’t leave the house, I refused to go to school and wasn’t sure that it would ever get better.

Now that I’m on the other side, and as much as I hated hearing it when I was struggling, I can say that it does get better.

Anxiety is still a part of my everyday life and always will be. I still take a while to be confident in front of new people, I often catch myself worrying about the future and I’m not the best at being spontaneous.

Occasionally, I still feel the anxiety that overwhelms my system, but it doesn’t last as long, and I’ve learnt more ways to deal with it.

Everyone’s coping strategies are going to be different and what works for me might not work for others. I try my best to distract myself. I might go on my phone or try to focus on something out of the window. Eating sour sweets seems to work well too. Sometimes it helps to talk about it and other times that can make it worse.

It can be a lot of trial and error. Not only for the young person experiencing anxiety but for their parents too. Don’t be hard on yourself when you get it wrong and keep trying new things.

Anxiety is a bumpy ride and having someone alongside you with an encouraging word or an understanding nod is so important. It doesn’t always go away, but it does change as you learn new ways to cope, celebrate the big small moments, and realise that there’s nothing to be ashamed of.