Anxiety is a response that can be normal in stressful situations. Yet anxiety can get in the way of everyday living when feelings become excessive, all-consuming, and interfere with daily activities. When this occurs one may experience intense, excessive, and persistent worry and fear about everyday situations. They may have a fast heart rate, rapid breathing, sweating, or feel tired.

How can a parent coach help a parent support their child with anxiety?

First, it is important to note that a parent coach is not a mental health professional treating anxiety as a part of the coaching relationship. Coaches work as part of an integrative team including out-patient or in-patient therapists and the treatment center, consultants and educational professionals. Your coach helps you to understand and interpret diagnostic information coming out of treatment. Your coach helps you to consider your child’s anxiety with parenting interactions without overdoing it for your child and thus depleting their chance to build competency. Your coach helps you to shift your interactions, responses and household structure to better support your child physically and emotionally as they manage the complex process of navigating anxiety.

How can a parent coach help a parent manage their own anxiety?

Many parents we support are learning to live differently with their own anxiety. Additionally, it is natural to have anxiety triggered through the process of learning to best support an adolescent or young adult struggling in the home, at a treatment center, or transitioning home after wilderness therapy or a longer term setting can trigger anxiety. Working with a parent coach can help you build the skills to identify when you are responding, or not responding, to a situation based on an anxiety response, and will teach you concrete skills to move through this with awareness and get back into effective action.

If you need support in this area and want to explore our contract options, please BOOK A CONSULTATION today.