Are you able to experience happiness while your child is struggling with anxiety or OCD? Do you feel guilty or tell yourself stories about your ability to be “happy” while your child is suffering?
We all lose it at one time or another. Parents are human. You are human. We inevitably will lose our cool and say or do things that we regret. But those parenting moments hold untapped clues to what is overwhelming us. Those moments hold wisdom, if we are able to move past the shame to see the insight underneath.
Raising kids with anxiety or OCD is hard enough. But when you add chronic pain to your daily routine it can push you over the edge. Often we backburner our own issues. We tell ourselves that we don’t have time for our struggles. That we don’t have time to address our needs. We push through and do more damage in the end. But the truth is if you don’t take care of yourself, you won’t be able to effectively take care of your child. Helping a child with anxiety or OCD is exhausting and chronic pain will only add to that fatigue. In this week’s AT Parenting Survival Podcast I talk to Dr. Andrea Durand, my go-to expert on all things pain related. She explores our relationship with chronic pain and discusses ways we can address the pain to minimize its impact on our daily lives.
When we are raising a child with anxiety or OCD it can be all consuming. So consuming that we put everything on hold, including our own mental health. This is a slippery slope because without our own mental stability, we won’t be able to be an anchor for our child. In this week’s AT Parenting Survival Podcast I explore why it is so crucial we focus on our own mental health and how this will actually help our children as well.
Anxiety and OCD can cause our children to act in ways that can be overwhelming, disheartening and sometimes even hurtful. It is easy to fall into the trap of taking our children’s anxiety or OCD personally. In this week’s AT Parenting Survival Podcast I talk about the many ways we can take our children’s anxiety or OCD behaviors personally, and what we can do instead.
We will all fall short sometimes and so will our children with anxiety or OCD. They will avoid, they will crumble, they will give in to their anxiety or OCD. That is all par for the course. More often than not they will view these situations as “failures.” They might beat themselves up or use the experience as evidence that they can’t do it again.
How to Stop Panic Attacks from Ruling Your Child’s Life Sometimes we focus so much on how to stop panic attacks that we miss an even bigger problem, avoidance. What’s even more debilitating than panic attacks is the panic around having them. Panic attacks create a knee-jerk reaction of avoidance. They might avoid going to school, going out with friends, or going to the movies. […]
Handling Parental Burnout Around Anxiety or OCD Parental burnout can take any one of us to our knees. When we are riding on fumes we aren’t good for anyone, including our kids. In this week’s AT Parenting Survival Podcast, I talk about things that cause parental burnout and what we can do to dig our way out of the hole. To take a deeper dive […]
Letting Go of How Life Should Be We have expectations about how our children’s lives should be. We have expectations about how our family should be. This can be reinforced by friends, family or even the school system. So what happens when all those expectations fall short? What happens when we look at our reality and it doesn’t match up? Parenting is messy and we […]
Handling Toddler & Preschooler Sleep Issues One of the first signs of anxiety in young children is sleep disturbance! Sleep disturbance can have a ripple effect throughout a child’s day. It can make them more cranky, anxious and irritable. It can make us, as parents, exhausted and impatient. That’s why I thought it would be helpful if I brought Allison, a sleep and wellness coach, […]
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