From Anxiety and Avoidance to Brave Behaviour
From Anxiety and Avoidance to Brave Behaviour – How Parents Can Make a Powerful Difference Posted by Karen Young
Part of our role as parents is providing our children with the experiences that will help them discover their everyday magic – their courage, resilience, resourcefulness and other qualities that will move them towards growth.
Sometimes though, anxiety will get in their way. Sometimes it will drive them to avoid the challenges, adventures and everyday experiences that will nourish them. This can be tough. We know they are strong enough and brave enough, but moving them forward through anxiety can push against every one of our parenting instincts. Something that can make it easier to move them towards brave behaviour instead of away from it can be understanding something so right can feel so wrong.
Loving parents do not cause anxiety. Studies suggest that parents are a powerful part of the solution. Parents have enormous power to reduce anxiety in their children by changing the way they (the parents) respond to anxiety.
The researchers caution that some children with extremely high anxiety might need more support, but for the most part, when parents change what they do, children will also change what they do (eventually). But first, there might be a battle – within the parent and with the child. Their distress will trigger our distress. We’ve been designed that way for a reason.
When human babies are born, they are not equipped to protect themselves from danger. Other animals are born ready to out-run or out-fight danger, but not our human babies. Instead, they are born wired to attach to a stronger, more powerful human who can protect them from a threat. That stronger, more powerful human is wired to attach just as deeply to that little person and protect him or her from the threat.
This is the attachment system. It’s one of the reasons we humans have survived as a collective for as long as we have: When our children feel unsafe, their distress will alert us (a bigger, stronger adult) to a possible threat and a need for protection. The human response to threat is the fight or flight response – anxiety. Anxiety in our children will trigger anxiety in us. This is the way the parent-child attachment is meant to work. As loving, committed parents, when our children are distressed, our own powerful, instinctive fight or flight response (anxiety) will motivate us to take action to keep them safe. It’s primitive and it’s powerful, and we’ve been doing it this way since the beginning of us.
As our little people grow, they will gradually become more independent and more capable of brave behaviour. The role of protecting themselves will start to gently move from our hands and into theirs. They will look more to their own resourcefulness and resilience, and less to us to shield them from the things that feel unfamiliar or bigger than them. They will start to trust that they have what it takes to do things that might feel scary (but safe), or hard (but good for them).
When anxiety gets in the way, it can make it tough for our children to realise – or trust – that as they grow, they are less vulnerable and more capable. They keep turning to us to protect them because it’s what they’ve always done.
It’s completely understandable that as loving parents, we would respond by ‘protecting’ them because that’s what we’ve always done.
But what are we protecting them from?
The answer most often is fear. When the situation is actually safe, we are not protecting them from harm, but from the fear of harm. Unnecessary protection – as in protecting them when they don’t need protection – is over-protection. This is usually done with the most loving intent, but it can also shrink their world.
Here’s the problem – it’s just on the other side of fear that our children learn what they are capable of. It’s how they stretch their edges and start to discover their potential. When they move through fear, they learn that the things that feel scary most often aren’t, that they can be anxious and brave at the same time, and that they can do hard things. When our children respond to anxiety with avoidance, rather than moving through, they lose the opportunity to learn these important lessons. They will stay safe, but they won’t realise they are capable of bigger, braver things. They won’t have the evidence they need to trust their own capacity to move through anxiety. The option – and it’s powerful – is for us to trust it enough for them.
“Better to fight for something than to live for nothing”