Teaching Kids to Get Ahead of Their Anxiety By Expecting It

Anxiety Teaching Kids to Get Ahead of Their Anxiety By Expecting It Simple strategies to navigate worry by shrinking and approaching kids' fears. Posted September 20, 2026 Reviewed by Abigail Fagan Key points - Teaching kids to expect worries helps them feel empowered to "test" worry, rather than "trust" it. - We can help kids separate from fears by asking, "what is worry saying to you," not, "why are you worried?" - Kids can learn to shrink their fears through fact-checking, right-size risk, and approach one step at a time. Welcome to a new school year! As kids are settling into the rhythms of the new year, the fears they brought with them—“Will I have friends? Will the teacher be nice?” have quieted down, but likely others have popped in—the book report, the class camping trip, the cafeteria dynamics. When families experience what feels like a whack-a-mole dynamic with fears—resolve one, and another (or two or three) takes its place, it’s easy to think, “We’ll never get anywhere!” But that’s not how it has to be. Expecting Anxiety Doesn’t Mean Expecting Your Child to Be Anxious If we want kids to be equipped to navigate their emotions wherever they land, one thing we need to do is help them expect certain emotions to come up—what comes up most? Anxiety. Fears and worries are normal and expected parts of life—but just waiting for them to pass is not our only option. Anxiety thrives on what is unfamiliar or uncertain. It sets off an alarm. By expecting fears and worries, we can teach kids what anxiety is and what to do next. When we help kids expect anxiety as a super-fast, no-fault worst-case scenario narrative that always gets there first, kids can be prepared when it shows up, not scared by what it’s telling them. They can learn that their job is to test worry, not trust it. Rather than feeling their only choices are being stuck stressing or avoiding, they can learn to unpack their fears, analyze instead of catastrophize. That’s what it means to get ahead of anxiety. Where Do We Go From Here? Helping Your Child Understand Fear is How They’ll Really Feel Better When our kids are upset, parents can feel hijacked at warp speed in an emergency-mode crossroads. We have to do something. Do we help our kids feel better by distracting, reassuring, or simply jumping right in and “fixing” situations for our kids fears on the one hand, or, “tough loving-it”: leave them to sink or swim so they will learn how to grow. When it comes to our kids’ emotional lives, it can feel like those two instincts are at odds. Truly we don’t have to choose like that. When we do an inner pivot from: “How do I help my child feel better?” to “How do I help my child understand themselves better?” suddenly what feels like opposites, come together as collaborators: we are helping our kids feel better because they feel heard and understood by us, and they are now headed in a direction of growth because they are asking questions, and responding to our questions. They are separate from their fears and that shift in direction helps them have a shift in perspective: they are curious, deciders, interpreters, choosers, of understanding why they are feeling the way they are and what they can do about it often themselves to feel better. Let the Unpacking Begin: Three Essential Shifts to Teaching Your Child to Navigate Anxiety Separate Your Child from Their Fears and Help Them Name What They Are. When children feel overwhelmed with anxiety or, really any emotion—the feelings can overtake them and seem like an identity--that is permanently who they are instead of temporarily what they’re experiencing. “I am anxious” doesn’t mean “I’m feeling anxious.” Instead, it has come to mean: “I’m anxious; this is who I am, and that’s why I can’t do this hard thing.” We need to help kids know that naming the emotion is the starting point, not the destination. The first step in order for all of that to happen is to separate themselves from their feelings and it is a simple edit that makes it happen. A child says: “I’m so anxious!” Instead of responding with, “It’s OK, or what are you anxious about?” We can say: “I understand that you’re feeling anxiety, this is a new situation so there are a lot of unknowns. What is anxiety saying to you? What do you think?” Suddenly they are on the outside of the anxiety looking in—as interpreters, questioners, analysts. Giving that anxious voice a name, “the Worry Bug, or Disaster Guy,” helps emphasize this separation. It turns what is vague and overwhelming into something concrete they can observe, edit, and increasingly take charge of. How to Help Kids Unpack, Shrink and Rethink Fears. Once we know what anxiety is telling them, we want to encourage kids to put that to the test. Not putting your child to the test as in… “Why do you think that?” but empowering your child to put worry to the test: “What do you think of what worry is saying, does that sound likely to you or does it sound scary to you?” As much as we might want to just correct our kids (lovingly) and say—“that’s not true, or that’s not going to happen!” it’s going to be more effective in the short run and the long run to teach them how to reach those conclusions themselves. Two strategies help kids gain the perspective—the first is “fact checking”—ask kids to pick up their “red pen” like the teacher would and correct what worry is saying to them. Is it a fear or a fact? Can you give worry a true false test? Or, asking the “million-dollar question” if they could win a million dollars by guessing right what will happen, would they bet on worry or on another idea. Another strategy for fact-checking is getting a “second opinion” by bringing in their panel of experts, their inner board of directors—consulting their favorite athlete, celebrity, teacher—through their imagination. What would that role model say? And what do you think? How to Help Kids Experiment with Approaching: Practice Makes Progress: Slow and Steady, and Rehearsals for the Win. Once kids have shrunk the fears down through their fact-checking, it’s time to take the show on the road because seeing is believing—no amount of talking can substitute for the experience of seeing that you can be afraid, and you can still do hard things, and the anxiety resolves—and you might even feel really proud of yourself. The key is finding the right-sized challenge: not too easy where they won’t feel a sense of accomplishment, but also not too hard where they aren’t likely to desensitize, they may feel like they need to leave midway, thus reinforcing the anxiety instead of their courage. I like to teach about desensitization by talking about what it’s like to get into a cold swimming pool. How does it feel at first? Freezing! What happens after a few minutes? It feels better! Why is that? Because we adjust. Bingo. We are built to adjust. We need to hang in with an experience for a bit to see that we do adjust. Practicing dry runs counts! Doing rehearsals and partial steps count! Remember, any “approaching” a feared situation leads to more useful information than avoiding does, so be flexible in acknowledging the challenges that miss the bullseye but land on the board. May this be the year when more kids learn to navigate anxiety by expecting it so they can unpack it, dismantle its logic, and build up new experiences that unchecked anxiety would never let them have. Here’s to a great school year and as always, here’s to less worry all around. ©Tamar E. Chansky, Ph.D.