Accommodating Children's Anxiety Can Do More Harm Than Good | Psychology Today - 1 views
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Parents face great challenges raising kids in our increasingly complex, frightening and uncertain world. The CDC reports that anxiety is on the rise among children, affecting 7.1 percent of children 6 to 17 years of age, about 4.4 million U.S. kids. The majority are untreated.
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Children face myriad challenges—bullying, developmental trauma, information overload, global political upheavals and conflict, climate change, high rates of family breakup, and so on.
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Learning to ride out anxiety and negotiate firm-but-flexible boundaries is a language much harder to learn in adulthood.
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Parental consistency can help protect children from emotional problems. Children can and do become caught in the middle between parents who aren’t getting along. Such "triangulation" distracts children from addressing their own needs. Compassion buffers empathy, allowing parents to tolerate their children's distress without getting overwhelmed, numbing out, or becoming enraged. Parents are encouraged to engage their curiosity when they feel the urge to accommodate or try to overpower children.
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Perception was important for mothers. Mothers who reported that their children showed more severe symptoms were more likely to use accommodation, but maternal accommodation was unrelated to the mothers' own reported distress and emotional state. It may be that mothers wish to spare their children anticipated distress, and that this desire is different from overall distress. Including measures of empathy and parental distress due specifically to child's distress could tease this apart in future studies.
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Accommodation increases anxiety because youngsters never have a chance to fail and persist. This can stunt self-efficacy, preventing “fear extinction” and “habituation” to anxiety-provoking situations. It's a vicious cycle, increasing the chance of giving up too easily with future challenges, though innate resilience, related to child temperament, can mitigate the effects of problematic environmental factors.
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Higher child distress and emotional dysregulation, as measured by parents, was associated with increased parental accommodation. Parental accommodation was not correlated with child-reported distress and emotional dysregulation.
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maternal accommodation was correlated with child anxiety and externalizing behaviors (in which emotions are directed outward, typically in aggressive or destructive ways, rather than processed in healthy ways or bottled up)
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Accommodation fixes problems short-term—for instance when a parent "gives in" to a child's tantrums to get them to stop screaming, or bribes a child to do something rather than building intrinsic motivation with a longer-term process of rewarding effort and building an inner sense of confidence