Supporting Your Child: Conquering Back-to-School Anxiety and Building Resilience | Ep28

Uncover the keys to helping your child conquer back-to-school anxiety with the Special Parent Podcast. Join us for an enriching conversation with Shauna Fox as we explore strategies to support children, especially those with special needs, in navigating the emotional landscape of returning to the classroom. Discover how to validate your child's feelings, while teaching them that emotions don't always equate to reality. Our discussion provides insights into addressing classroom anxiety, social stress, and personal grief, ensuring your child feels confident and understood as they face these external pressures.

Empower your child's morning routine with practical tips designed to foster independence, particularly for those with ADHD. From personalized checklists to music playlists, learn how to turn chaotic mornings into seamless starts. We emphasize building resilience through controlled exposure to fear, allowing children to gain confidence and inner strength. Parents can benefit too, as we share strategies to manage the challenges along this journey. Join us in this episode for a wealth of knowledge to support your child's emotional well-being and boost their confidence for the school year ahead.

Chapters

• 0:00 Navigating Anxiety and Fear in Children
• 14:07 Creating Positive Morning Routines for Children
• 24:25 Building Inner Strength in Children

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Welcome to the Special Parent Podcast. I'm Dr Deanna Iverson, a proud mom of three boys and two incredible kids with special needs. I'm here to remind you that you're not alone on this journey. Whether you're navigating the highs, the lows or those moments in between, this podcast is your weekly dose of hope, help and heartfelt guidance. Together we'll celebrate the victories, tackle the challenges and connect with a community that truly understands. So grab your favorite cup of coffee or tea, settle in and let's embark on this empowering journey together. You've got this. Has your child ever felt anxious about attending school? I know my children have. Hi everyone, and welcome to the Special Parent Podcast. I'm Dr Deanna Iverson.

Speaker 1: 0:49

Today we're continuing our talks about fear and anxiety in our children, and some of this can even be applied to ourselves. So today, specifically talking about going back to school, I had a special guest and we did a couple episodes actually on back to school tips, tricks, especially for special needs parents. So Shauna Fox and I have a three-part series that is already posted. So if you haven't had a chance to go to specialparentorg and check that out, I highly recommend it. Even if you're into the school year, it's still a good way. Maybe it can help kind of rewrite a rocky ship or help you with that second semester start.

Speaker 1: 1:27

Our goal as parents is to empower our children. We want to help our children navigate the emotions that they're going to experience Anxiety and fear are normal. In fact, all of our emotions are normal. They're all part of our everyday life, our everyday experience as human beings. It's how we navigate these emotions that's key. It's critical to our success as adults and our success in our relationships. So emotions happen to us. A statement that is frequently made with the community that I work with is that your feelings aren't facts. They're real, but they're not necessarily the facts of the situation, because four different people can be in the same situation and have four different feelings. So your feelings, while they're real to you and we want to teach our children this are not necessarily the facts of the situation. And that's where we have to go from our middle limbic brain, which is just a reaction emotion center brain, coming forward to our thinking brain and we have to say is this a real way that we want to feel about this situation?

Speaker 1: 2:38

School, school can produce a lot of anxiety and a lot of fear, yet it's not something that we specifically need to be fearful and anxious about. So as parents, we need to empower our children with a way that they can overcome, push through and find success, regardless of the anxiety and the fear that they're experiencing. Psychology Today said reasonable emotions can cloud our ability to judge situations. Anxiety about school can be exhausting for both parents and for children. It can exhaust us both.

Speaker 1: 3:15

I know that for me just at the beginning of school. As a parent, I'm nervous, I'm excited, I'm ready for them. I'm also at the time going. I hope they get good teachers, I hope the teacher understands their IEP. So I'm going through all these thoughts in my brain and, strangely enough, I've been through school and I'm still experiencing these emotions. So I can only imagine, because I don't really remember as a kid all of it, but I do remember sometimes lying in bed the night before school started, sometimes unable to sleep, because I don't really remember as a kid all of it, but I do remember sometimes lying in bed the night before school started, sometimes unable to sleep because I had so many different emotions going in.

Speaker 1: 3:51

So one of the things I talked about specifically in my first two sessions on anxiety was how important it is as parents that we question correctly. So, walking up to our child who's having trouble sleeping the night before or the week leading up to school, we want to say something like, hey, how are you feeling about school starting? And let them come out with all the feelings, the excitement, the anxiety, the this, the that, and say I can totally understand. I remember when I started school and have a great conversation, then also talk about, hey, I got through it and you will too, and empower them with that hope. What we don't wanna say is are you anxious about school? Are you scared to go back to school? Because what we do when we ask the question that way is we tell them that that's probably a feeling they should be having. So that's why it's really important to question children in a particular way. Hey, if you've asked those questions before and you're now going, oh man, don't worry about it, you're probably going to do it again. I know I still do sometimes, and sometimes, as my kids grow up, I even say you know what? I didn't ask that correctly. Let me rephrase that, and that's okay. That's okay as a parent.

Speaker 1: 5:06

Maybe they're anxious because they're going to be called on making friends, being teased, room packed with the people I know our high school classes can be up to 30 plus students, whereas some of our elementary school classes 20, 25 students. That's still a lot of kids in one room for one adult to be working with, and they can even feel that everyone's looking at them or they can feel that nobody cares about them. So you can have these wide range of emotions and every child's going to fall in the middle somewhere and guess what? There is fear about being called on. There is what if I don't know the answer? Or what if I do know the answer and I couldn't get it out. So we have to work through strategies on that.

Speaker 1: 5:44

Maybe they're anxious because of outside of school situations. Maybe they have some internal feelings. Maybe they're having grief A family member or even a pet passed away recently and I don't want to go back to school. I'm still dealing with these emotions. Or maybe they have some low self-esteem. That's going on and they're unsure of themselves. Those are all completely normal and that might impact how they feel about going to school, even though it's actually not about school. So helping our children identify that is really critical to helping them processing it too. Or maybe they're anxious about their abilities. Some of our students that are in our special ed classes and my children know, you know, I've got these areas I'm just not good in, and going to school sometimes highlights for me that I'm not good at it and other people are good at it. So they might be anxious because of their own inabilities in a subject area, their struggles with their behavior, their struggles with their behavior, their struggles with their ADHD and ability to pay attention. Maybe they have tics. Sometimes children with autism or on medications will develop tics. So these are all things that they could be nervous about, and I probably didn't even hit all of them. In fact I'm sure I didn't. So that's just a start.

Speaker 1: 7:03

So what do we do? First and foremost, we want to ask those open-ended questions to help our children articulate what's going on. And we may have to continuously dig, because the first time you ask the question we may not get deep enough and your child may not be able to really pinpoint what's going on. And it may not be just one situation. It could be. You know, my cat died three months ago, but now that I'm starting school I don't have my cat to snuggle with and make me feel comfortable. So it's actually multiple things that are happening. So when we dig deep and dig over time, asking those open-ended questions, we give them an opportunity to process. Remember, when we talkended questions, we give them an opportunity to process. Remember, when we talk through things, we process them emotionally too, which is why a lot of talk therapy is good. So what if my child has a hard time talking about things? Exactly right, a lot of kids do.

Speaker 1: 7:58

Communication is a barrier for a lot of children, so let's find other ways to help them communicate. Drawing is a good one, journaling if they can write. But if they can write, they can. Probably a lot of them can talk, but maybe they don't want to, they're not comfortable yet. So journaling might be best. But drawing is one way to do it. Printing off pictures of different things, allowing them to kind of create a cut and paste collage about how they're feeling about the situation. So there's a lot of different ways you can help them express what it is that they're going through, maybe even have them create a song or create a game out of it.

Speaker 1: 8:38

If you can get your child to just in a way, tell you this is how I'm feeling, even if it's without words, then you can help them process those feelings, and sometimes the processing is just a simple hug from mom and dad and saying I understand completely why you feel that way. I also believe that you're going to be okay because it's a safe environment and I'm gonna help you get through this. And sometimes that's all they need If they're having trouble getting out of bed to go to school. What's hard about that is school is not very good at helping with that problem because they're not there. So my child's having trouble getting out of bed in the morning.

Speaker 1: 9:16

I'm going to tell you right now bribery sometimes is the parent's best weapon tool. Bribery can be the best tool. Hey, if you want to have your phone, your electronics, if you want to play at Susie's house, if you want to, well, you may have to use it. If you want to play with the dog, if you want a piece of gum after school, go get a treat after school, whatever it is. If you want me to put a candy in your lunch today, I need you to get up and go, and even sometimes thinking about the whole day is too much, so let's wheel it back.

Speaker 1: 9:51

Let's say all right, when you get out of bed and go brush your teeth, there's going to be a five minute token for electronics. All you have to think about is that I got the token. On the back of it's going to be maybe just use poker chips or cards and on the front do five minutes. And on the back tape, another piece of paper that says what the next step is. And the next step is eat breakfast and at the toaster or wherever it is the plate that they're going to put breakfast on, you have another five minute token. So they get five more minutes of electronics time and of course these numbers can be adjusted for your need. But then on the back of that it's going to say the next thing. So they're not thinking From the minute they get up. They're not thinking about the whole day, they're thinking about the next step.

Speaker 1: 10:34

So when we break down things into steps, sometimes that can help curtail the anxiety of the whole situation and that can really help us out. So small issues like that, or big issues, can be broken into small issues by just tackling one thing at a time. So step one helping them identify the problem. If they can't identify what they're feeling and what's making them feel that way, then we're going to have a hard time helping them push through and resolve it. So identifying it by asking the open-ending questions, and then what they're feeling by asking the opening-end questions about their emotions.

Speaker 1: 11:12

Step two now is focus on what you can control. I can control getting up and brushing my teeth. I can control eating breakfast. I can control getting on the bus. When I'm on the bus, I can control where I sit, and that may or may not be a possibility, but if that is a stress, it is something that can be worked out with the school, absolutely something that you can get help with as far as transportation goes. So that's where you can start tagging in the school. In an area where you as a parent now have to relinquish some control, you can tag in the school to help you out. Focus on what you can control.

Speaker 1: 11:50

Most fear is learned. Most fear is not there from the time we're born. It is something we learn by watching others or we learn it because of interactions that we have that cause us to feel that way. So, since most fear is learned, that means it can be unlearned. Now, that does take time, so please take the time to walk your children through this. Say, okay, you learned that that was something to be afraid of, but I can tell you right now it is.

Speaker 1: 12:25

There are, for example, in an elementary school, there are 500 students 300 depending on the elementary school, 500 students who get up and go without the fear. Therefore, you can know this is not something you need to be afraid of. So, since it's not something you need to be afraid of, it is something we can learn to overcome. It is something we can learn to tackle. So that's where we start talking about with them the difference between a learned fear and a legitimate fear. That actually needs to be something we're afraid of. Okay, jumping off a cliff without a bungee cord fearful. So we want to build confidence in our children and to do that, they need to know that we believe in them and they need to know that we can help them identify fearful versus non-fearful situations, situations where they're safe versus non-fearful situations, situations where they're safe Maybe they need strategies, but they're safe and situations where it is okay to say, hey, we don't cross the street without looking both ways. That's a legitimate fear. But we can go to school and overcome the anxiety that comes with some of school. So confident kids are capable of taking on more challenges. So we have to unlearn the fear that we learned from maybe not being successful in something or having a situation that made us fearful, like bullying. I have a couple episodes on bullying. So if you have any questions or concerns about bullying with your children, please go to specialparentorg and check that out, because there's a lot of tips and strategies and there are a lot of resources out there for you. I've posted several resources on my website also.

Speaker 1: 14:07

Step three create routines. If you have morning routines and after school routines, that's going to help children feel that sense of control. That's going to help children feel that sense of control, overcome that fear that they've learned. That's upcoming and it's just going to help them, in a sense, have a checkbox to go through the day. So, first things, first checklists.

Speaker 1: 14:28

I do have a checklist for my kids. In the morning we have a binder and it's just a really thin binder because we don't put a lot of papers in it, but on one side of it it says good morning and there's a checklist for each child, because I have three kids in three very different situations in life and they have to do different things in the morning. Of course, your basics brush your teeth, put deodorant on. I have boys Brush your teeth, put your deodorant on. Those basic things are still there. But then there's also some things like one of my children makes lunch every day, the other one doesn't. So make lunch is on one list but not on the other. Not all three of my children take medication, so take meds is on some of the lists, not on all the lists.

Speaker 1: 15:11

I have another checklist for the afternoon. It says good afternoon or you could even have it say welcome home or so glad you're here, and then it has a checklist when you walk in the door you're going to do the following items. It doesn't mean that I'm not there for them while they're doing them, but it gives them a sense of power and control and a sense of especially if they have ADHD hey, I can do this. It teaches them a strategy that's useful for life. So create checklists for them.

Speaker 1: 15:39

Create time trackers, those countdown timers where when you turn them on for 10 minutes, it actually has the red shrink and that helps them visually go. Oh, I don't have much time left. I got to keep going Because, especially with children with ADHD, which kind of couples with autism a lot of times, keeping track of time, you're just fighting a battle You're not going to win. You need to give them strategies and so to reduce the headaches and the stress for everybody in the house, let's develop those. My special guest on a previous episode when we talked about going back to school Miss Shauna Fox. She talked about how, for her, having ADHD as an adult, she has a playlist that the songs are specifically five minutes long, so she knows that if she has 10 minutes left, she hits the playlist. She only has two songs and by the time two songs are done, she needs to be ready, and that helps her through it because for her, the songs and the music are very motivating for her. So find time trackers, ways for your children to be more cognizant of the passage of time, and this is also a strategy they can use as an adult. So some sort of timer or countdown.

Speaker 1: 16:51

Focus on the positive. We want to help our children in the morning, especially when they're getting ready for school. Focus on the things that are going really well. Good morning morning, especially when they're getting ready for school. Focus on the things that are going really well. Good morning, staying energized If they're oh, it's already a bad morning. This has happened. Or I dropped this. One morning it was I dropped my toothbrush in the toilet and the whole. You can imagine the day was going to be the worst day in the world. Now, well, we had a backup toothbrush so it was okay, but at the very least I was like you can finger brush your teeth. I'll buy you a toothbrush after school and we can focus on the positive and we can turn it into a fun and light environment, helping them overcome little tiny things like that, the things that sometimes can seem like they're going to completely derail a whole day.

Speaker 1: 17:40

If you manage those with them, if you're sitting there and just keeping things positive, they're going to learn that behavior. They're going to learn that they don't need to be stressed and they don't need to have fear, that they can handle it with a good sense of humor and a positive attitude. I kind of talked about this earlier, thinking about the next steps in the morning routine, not the whole morning, not the whole day. So breaking it down into next steps for them can be really helpful too. All right, next thing is to teach problem solving skills for when they are away from you and they need to start critically thinking through things. So problem solving skills. Again, the bullying situation I have two whole episodes on bullying. So go to specialparentorg and talk about bullying there, and there's also on my website several different tips, tricks and website resources for you.

Speaker 1: 18:34

But how do we handle things? How do we handle test anxiety? Well, okay, let's talk about it and you might even say here's a real world skill, let's Google it together, test anxiety and let's read some stuff together. Oh, that one's not going to work for you. Oh, that sounds like a good idea I never thought of. And go through that with them when they're younger. It's not so much usually test anxiety, but it might be more like my friends didn't want to sit with me at lunch yesterday. That's a legitimate. That hurts man. That's going to whoop right in the child's little heart.

Speaker 1: 19:07

So, as a parent, what you can do is you can help them come up with a strategy. First of all, listen, hear out all the emotions, understand that that pain is real. That's a pain of rejection and you have to help them know that that's going to happen again in life. So we need to have a way to handle it and talk them through the situation. Who can they sit with? What kind of situations can they come up with at school as far as. Are there any other places to eat lunch? And it's so individualized. I'm not going to give you a million different options here, but I would suggest that, even if you just looked it up online with them, they can, or for yourself to show them, and then maybe even create like cut out printed pictures. If they're struggling to communicate with you on that, you can have cut out printed pictures for them to use to help understand what it is that we need to do. We're going to do step one, then step two, then step three. If this happens, we're going to do this and we're going to go talk to our teacher, we're going to go talk to our counselor, we're going to go outside in the playground and sit in a different place. So that way we can maybe just observe.

Speaker 1: 20:20

One thing that I think is hard for children heck, it's hard for adults is the understanding that sometimes being alone is not the same as being lonely. And I do have an episode where I talked with Annie about the difference of being alone versus being lonely. And sometimes, when we deal with rejection at school, especially because mom and dad aren't there to help lift us up, we have to give them strategies. Maybe we're going to give them mantras that they can repeat you know, I am beautiful, I am loved, I am strong. Maybe we're going to give them something to look at, a picture of our family and how much we all love each other and we care for each other. But while they're dealing with that, we also have to teach them sometimes it's okay to be alone, because to be alone is an opportunity for connection that wouldn't have been there if I was with those other friends. And that's hard to teach, it's harder to walk through, but it's a real life skill because we have to admit, even as adults, it still happens.

Speaker 1: 21:25

So, teaching them that these are real world problems that they are going to tackle again and again and again. So we need to provide them with real world strategies and ways to handle the situation that are positive. Not getting angry not how dare those friends not like you. Not blaming, because that doesn't lead to healing. What we want to do is we want to teach them how to work through bullying, rejection, fears of test, anxiety, fears of not being successful, because they're going to have times. They're not successful. We're not 100% successful in everything that we do. If we are, then we're being too choosy and we're not taking enough risk. It's good to take risk. It's good to fall down sometimes. We're going to learn from that, so we want to teach them to walk through that.

Speaker 1: 22:16

Finally, we have to differentiate between what is a real fear and what might be an exaggerated fear. So, for example, sometimes fears are attention seeking. For example, mom, can you check the closet one more time or can you bring me back a cup of water? When that starts happening a lot, then it's really attention seeking. It's wanting you to stay around, and sometimes we need to say, okay, they need some attention in another. Maybe they need some special mom and dad time, or mom just time or dad just time. Maybe we need to sit down with them in a different situation, not in that moment, because we're not going to give in to that fear, anxiety. We need to sit down with them in a different time and take them out to lunch, take them to the park, whatever it is, spend some extra quality time with them.

Speaker 1: 23:05

Another one is is there fear due to a perceived trauma and I'm very careful when I use this because I am a trauma therapist perceived trauma versus real trauma. The difference really is is that we can take a situation that wasn't traumatic and make it traumatic by how we choose to think about it. So if everyone was in this situation and everything was fine, but one person felt, oh my gosh, and it's just having this huge emotional reaction, we have to, in a sense, not dive into that. We have to simply say I get why you're feeling that way. Now your feelings are not facts. Let's re-examine the situation. Versus a real trauma the death of a family member, a pet, something, maybe a natural disaster that took place, a tornado wiping out your house that's a real trauma and that can impact going back to school. That can impact the way we feel about any situation. So what we want to do is we want to differentiate real fears versus kind of those exaggerated ones that are maybe attention seeking or exaggerated because they're not understanding a situation, they're just having a reaction to it, versus a real one that requires extra help, extra support from either a professional, mom, dad, etc.

Speaker 1: 24:25

Our goal as parents is slow, controlled exposure with a plan. A little fear kept in check can be useful. I gave the example in my last one. If you're driving in ice or snow, it's good to have a little bit of fear to keep you safe, to keep you in check. You want your children to have a little bit of fear when talking to strangers, because that keeps them safe. It keeps them in the back of their brain going is this a good situation? But we also don't want them to be so fearful that they won't leave the house or that they don't have the self-confidence to introduce themselves to mom or dad's friend who they're talking to. So that little bit of fear we want to have them have slow, controlled exposure with a plan. Little bit of fear we want to have them have slow, controlled exposure with a plan, and that's going to help them overcome anxiety, overcome fear, build self-confidence because now they know mom and dad believe that I can do this Become self-assured of their inner strength. That is our goal becoming self-assured of their inner strength, because someday they're going to have to rely on themselves for something. We're not going to be there and we want to teach them how to do that.

Speaker 1: 25:33

Next one, anxiety. Part four, our last one, is going to be all about coping strategies. So please tune in for that. Remember mom, dad, parents this isn't easy to navigate. It's going to take time. It might become exhausting for you at times and that's totally normal. So use your own coping strategies. But above all else, you're strong, you're capable and you've got this. This program is made possible by friends and partners of the Special Parent Podcast. For more information and to join our mailing list, visit specialparentorg.