Kids Awareness Series

Children that are often brought in for mental health treatment are seen for excessive worry or fears.  Parents are often confounded as to where the fears started and more importantly on how to help their child combat these fears that seem very real to them.  Common fears that are seen are the fear of water, animals, dark places, heights, and most often having to start school and be aways from their parents.  Of course, all of us feel fear at one time or another and the degree or severity of our fear is different at times.  What I am talking about is irrational fears that are excessive and are interfering with your child’s ability to function.  Here are a list of some strategies that a parent or caregiver can use with their child to help them work through and combat some of these fears. 

1.) Try to get your child to open up and talk about what is going and how they are feeling.  As a therapist, this is our entire goal and we have a number of strategies that we use in order to get a child to open and talk to us to figure out what is going on and how to help them.  Just listen to your child and do not make any judgments, just let them vent their feelings.  If they won’t up to you as a parent, then professional help may be needed.

2.) Research any books that are related to your child’s fears and purchase them in order to help your child learn coping strategies.  By your child having books that are related to their fears, they are able to identify with the characters in the books that are experiencing very similar symptoms to them and eventually work through their fear.

3.) Do NOT force a child to confront their fears all of a sudden.  Facing fears has to be at a very gradual pace.  In therapy, we call this systematic desensitization, a fancy word that means we expose a child to their fear very slowly over a period of time.  If you expose your child all of a sudden to their fear, then you will most likely make the situation much worse.  

4.) If you see that after you as the parent have tried talking to them, bought resource books related to the fear, and taken steps to resolve the problem and the problem persists, then consider help from a mental health professional. 

Children require a stable environment that is relatively free from chaos.  We all have chaos and stress in her lives from time to time, however a structured environment is the best in order to allay a child’s fears.  Remember, when children do not know what to expect and their lives are full of chaos, this often brings about anxiety and fears.

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