Kids Will Get Better Anxiety Relief if They Understand Anxiety: Interview with Karen Young from Hey Sigmund, Author of Hey Warrior

So many of us jump right into helping our anxious kids. Their battle is our battle. Their struggle is our struggle. We tell them how to breathe. We tell them how to think. But often, we don’t pause to tell them what anxiety is and how it works. We don’t help them understand anxiety. We don’t decode it and break it down into bite size pieces. Maybe this is because as parents, we often don’t understand anxiety ourselves? Maybe we don’t want our children to think there is anything wrong with them. Maybe we don’t want to pathologize or label them. But in the end we are doing our children a disservice. It is hard to get anxiety relief when you don’t understand how anxiety works. When you don’t understand what is making you nauseous. When you don’t understand what is making your heart pound in your ears. When you don’t understand what is making you sweat on a cold winter day.

So how do you help your child understand anxiety? How do you provide anxiety relief? It starts with education.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Karen Young, a psychologist, author of Hey Warrior and the creator of HeySigmund.com. Not only does she help us break down how to talk to our children about anxiety, she has written a perfect children’s book to aid us in the process.