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“HOW CAN WE stop our child having panic attacks?” and “How can we get them back to school?” are the two most common questions concerned parents ask me.
If you’re reading this and looking for answers too, then the first thing I will tell you is that you’re asking the wrong questions.
There’s something much bigger at stake in your child’s life than panic and the issue of school attendance. A deep sense of inadequacy and discomfort shapes their lives.
These children and young people essentially have little or no faith in themselves and the world… and that is the core issue. In my experience, I have found that school-based anxiety is merely a symptom of this phenomenon.
In today’s world, we are seeing epidemic levels of children and teenagers who are highly self-critical, very intense, gripped by anxiety and struggling to attend school or even leave their bedrooms. The world is a threatening place and they are fearful of so many bad things happening, troubled by how they have messed up and feeling panicky about how they’ll not be able to handle future situations.
As they focus their attention for hours at a time on what did or could go wrong, they become worked up, endlessly stressing themselves out.
This is where oxytocin, a comfort chemical, comes into play. These kids become oxytocin addicts. Life becomes more bearable and manageable when they live within a comfort zone — often, a ‘comfort parent’ is recruited into the zone.
Parents often tell me they are very close to their children and that they talk a lot. I reframe this somewhat for them: “It’s not that you’re very close, it’s that he/she is highly dependent on you.” In these cases, the default strategies parents use take the form of reassurance and the building up of the young person’s confidence — neither of which works in my experience.
As inhibitive children and adolescents reach the edge of their comfort zones and the threat feels more tangible, their brain’s flight or fight system becomes activated. This is triggered when we perceive that our safety and survival are at stake. It is a heightened stress response which sends the kid into extreme panic, resulting in various types of meltdown including tearful collapses, rage attacks and numbing out.
On the first morning of each new academic term, many inhibitive children and adolescents become hyper-stressed, knowing they have to face another term of academic pressure and social unease. The stress from being out of their comfort zone is a grim reality staring them in the face — no longer on the horizon but happening right now. The thought of putting on the dreaded uniform and walking through the front door of the school building — and having to do it repeatedly until the next school break — pushes many over the edge. Sometimes they manage the first few weeks or even months… but all too often, they grind to a halt. It can be overwhelming for parents who suddenly find their once easygoing child going through such a tough time.
Here are the three questions I invite parents to reflect on when anxiety that is impairing development and functioning has taken hold of a child or teenager:
How do I enable the comfort zone?
Anxious kids need to feel comfort, and parents do what they can to facilitate this. However, these parenting strategies tend to merely be short-term oxytocin generators which lack transformative potential, for example, reassuring hugs and treats to cheer her up.
The more the child struggles the more the parents step in to compensate, reassure, encourage and indulge. Whilst attempting to be as supportive as possible, it’s useful to realise that continual recycling through this fixed relational theme is not only unhelpful but also reinforces dependency.
What happens at the edge of the comfort zone?
When the integrity of the young person’s comfort zone comes under real or perceived threat (“I have to go to school. I don’t want my mum to go to work. What if something bad happens? What if the burglars come? What if I fail?”) that’s where we see the anxiety symptoms emerge: OCD, panic attacks, eating disorders, meltdowns, tics, pulling hair, scratching, self-harm, suicidal process.
There’s a lot of cortisol flowing in these moments… and in a way, the production of cortisol is contagious. Your job is to bring that cortisol down. I promise you there will be very little, if any progress whilst stress chemicals are at overwhelming levels. So one of the first things to consider is how to explore options for lowering cortisol. There are abundant suggestions and resources online, tapping is one simple start:
Focus on lowering your own cortisol (challenging I know, as a parent your cortisol levels are through the roof if your child is struggling with school-based anxiety) and then support your child to do the same.
When children are overwhelmed, they are in a state of emotional dysregulation. Practice empathy — start to imagine the world from your child or teenager’s perspective. I mean, from the inside out. Imagine the level of threat she experiences, the dread she feels leaving her comfort zone, the oppression of the world she inhabits. I’m going to suggest that you spend about 10 minutes each day for a couple of weeks simply stepping into her shoes and being her. Then write a paragraph or two afterwards about what the experiment was like and what struck you.
The next task is to develop an ear for the emotional. When she communicates with you, learn to fire up your emotional radar and identify feelings. Try listening out for feelings she’s naming or describing, and you’ll get to the heart of her experience more directly.
Sometimes she’ll clearly state them and other times she’ll hint at them. Often their communication to you is full of feelings. It’s so easy to miss them because, as parents, you are focused on trying to take away her suffering and make everything better. Mirroring her feelings back to her will help to ground and settle her. Offering solutions, trying to be positive and attempting to fix all have their place, but they are premature if your daughter is still off-balance.
You have to focus on helping your child find calm. A really effective way to do this is to let her know that you recognise her feeling world. This is empathy and is a great way of creating comfort. It will offer a bridge to reconnection with you again. She’ll feel met and much less isolated and alone in her struggle. Then after you’ve communicated your empathy you simply state that you’re there to support her. You don’t have to qualify your support, just name it. This mirroring and naming of support seems awfully simple, but it can be powerfully effective.
There is usually quite a contrast between where you would like your child to be and where she actually is. You can support her to reach the desired end point with a step-by-step approach. Your child may need to go through a whole bunch of levels of comfort zone expansion in order to get to a place of much healthier functioning.
How to begin is to focus on Level One… just starting with baby steps. Once Level One has been mastered, we move to Level Two and so on. Expanding the comfort zone in slow, steady degrees is how this will be done. When you arise each morning, after attending to your cortisol-lowering strategies and focusing on empathic attunement of your child’s experience, ask yourself this… “Is there one thing I could start doing today that would help and one thing I could stop doing that would help?” Consider introducing sleep hygiene, screen boundaries, good nutrition, fresh air, concentration, tolerable socialising and creative activities into your child’s life gradually.
Keep focused on the baby steps and your child will hopefully be in much better shape physically and psychologically. You might find then that school doesn’t seem like such an impossible prospect.
Bronagh Starrs maintains a private practice in Omagh, Northern Ireland as a consultant psychotherapist, clinical supervisor, writer and trainer. She is Creator and Programme Director of the MSc Adolescent Psychotherapy in Dublin Counselling & Therapy Centre in partnership with University of Northampton. Bronagh teaches and presents internationally on the developmental phenomena and therapeutic dynamics of contemporary adolescence. Her first book Adolescent Psychotherapy — A Radical Relational Approach (Routledge, 2019) has received international acclaim. Bronagh is running a workshop for parents entitled “Parenting Strategies for Anxious Teens” on Monday 8 April in the Croke Park Hotel, Dublin. More at blackfortinstitute.ie.
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No one seems interested in the basic function of farming, creating food.!Any suggestions on what we should eat when all the rewilding is complete!
@Tommy Lennon: Nearly all the food we produce is exported though, so rewilding vast swathes of land wouldn’t affect our access to food.
@Tommy Lennon: Heather!! This hogwash is really going overboard. 5.2 Million people have to eat something!!
Few years ago they couldn’t give away enough money to reclaim land, bogs were drained, ditches bulldozed to make fields bigger now give more money to put it back, what next
@Andy Murphy: it’s as if priorities can change over time.
Mad, Ted!
@Ciaran Foster: or money changes hands ?
Totally agree. I bought the book from Eoghan back in December as a present but could not stop reading it.. great eye opener when walking around any nature area and looking at our human shaped environment.
Bought the book. Eoghan knows what he is talking about, we should listen
Lord save us from this stuff, so we return good farmland to the so called wild bush,
I have known so called farmers like this and they were to lazy to work their land and produce food, this was their cop out for not working their inheritance farm,
The boyo who wrote this article seems like one of them.
@Ned: You sound bitter. Were they “to” lazy to learn to spell also?
Every day I read or hear about another demand from the “Green Agenda”. Previously I would have considered myself environmentally conscious but I have rapidly become less so due to the polarised views presented.
More tree planting, ditch fertiliser (go organic) , drop bovines and ovines 20% in favor of grains and vegetables. Pay farmers to do so. Targets met… Simple..and it will be done.
Folks, do yourselves a favour and read his book.
Great book, highly recommend!
I’ve no problem to pay farmers to rewind their farms
But let’s house the homeless fix our health first eh?
We should change our approach to land use. A farm should be an inclosed area where sheep / goat / cows won’t go outside to graze on every little tree sapling. Same for sikka deer that has gone out of control in recent years. Nature and biodiversity has no chance in this country atm.
There are 8 Billion people on this planet that have to be fed every day and this idiot wants us to grow weeds. Enough of this nonsense. No matter what we do on this little island it will make little or no difference to global warming. We’re not the cause of the problem, but we could help alleviate the consequences.
@Liam Dunne: well we are the cause of the problem, rich countries like ireland are the ones who consume the most and produce the most carbon per capita, we still contribute to the overall problem
@Liam Dunne: It’s not about global warming, it’s about biodiversity. Read the article, then try reading some books.
We need all houses to be carbon neutral…citizens deserve at least cheap/free heating.
I’ve noticed a lot of hedgerows getting torn out of grazing fields near me over the last 2-3 winters.
It makes little sense, the farmer only gains a few square meters of space. Then any farm animals in the fields lose shelter from the elements during wind, rain & heat.
And of course nature loses its last piece of wilderness on the edge of the field.
Is there some sort of subsidy to do this sort of work or why is it being done?
So you want us to pay farmers to not work on the least viable part of their land. Sure.
@Dan Dare: they would need money to maintain fences to keep deer, sheep & goats off the land while it recovers.
Kill an extra quarter of a million cows a year and rewild as much land as possible . What will people eat if this goes ahead ? And there is no point in saying that we export most of what we produce as if that makes its consumption somewhere else on the planet irrelevant
Unbelievable, I grew up in a large farming community. Farmers are so so wealthy. The new generation of farmers are splashing the cash, massive mansions, big 4×4′s, new cars etc. Some small farmers may struggle a little like the rest of us. But the cash the big dairy guys are rolling in is unbelievable!
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