How Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Can Help Children with Anxiety

When children begin exhibiting signs of anxiety, many parents are reluctant to take them to therapy. There’s always a worry that therapy will be ineffective, too expensive, or even an invasion of your family’s privacy once insurance companies get involved. But certain types of therapy can work very well for helping your child to overcome her anxiety, and they can be implemented in the comfort and security of your own home. By purchasing an online self-help therapy program that incorporates elements of cognitive behavioral therapy, you can help your child work through her feelings of nervousness and reduce the overall amount of stress in her life.

Before we look at how cognitive behavioral therapy works and how it can benefit your child, it helps to know exactly how anxiety affects your child. The profound changes it causes occurs at both an emotional and physical level. So let’s look first at how anxiety works in children, and then how you can take steps to remedy it in your child.

How Anxiety in Children Works

If you have ever had a close call that triggered your fight or flight response, you know how anxiety works. On a physical level, you begin feeling an overwhelming variety of responses: you begin sweating, your heart rate speeds up, your breathing becomes rapid and shallow, and you might tremble or shake. Emotionally, you may fear that you are losing control, that you are dying, or that you cannot comprehend everything that’s going on. Children have the exact same stress response as adults, but with a few crucial differences.

First, children don’t usually understand the physical and emotional symptoms of a stress response. So as cortisol and adrenaline flood their little beings, they don’t understand that the biochemical response they’re feeling is normal. In fact, kids often become terrified of the physical and emotional effects of fear, leading to a vicious cycle of fear begetting fear that isn’t easily broken.

Second, kids are equipped with a kind of “short cut” through the neural pathways that is, in a sense, branded with each fearful experience. For example, if your child has a panic attack on the bus, her brain records this sensation and stores it for the next time her panic response is triggered. The next time she even sees a school bus, she may experience a panic attack much more quickly because this neural shortcut has been activated. On the plus side, this is a learned response. So with careful training, your child can unlearn this rapid reaction. It’s a hang-up from our caveman days, when survival was about learning fight or flight quickly, but our lives are rarely truly in danger nowadays.

What Is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy?

Now that you have an understanding of how fear works in your child, let’s take a quick look at cognitive behavioral therapy. This form of therapy, also known as CBT, has been selected as the treatment of choice for many mood disorders, especially depression. It’s also been proven to be effective in the treatment of anxiety, particularly in “unlearning” the fear response.

CBT is a form of talking therapy that focuses on the “here and now” rather than on past experiences. It was formed by the combination of two schools of therapeutic thought: behavioral therapy and cognitive thinking. With cognitive behavioral therapy, patients are exposed to the very thing that invites the fear response, in a controlled environment. The underlying theory is that fear is a learned response, and avoiding that fear trigger only strengthens the attached anxiety over time.

For example, people who have a phobia of spiders can often be cured of their fear during a single CBT session. It’s a highly effective mode of therapy; more effective, according to some reports, than medication.

Using Cognitive Behavioral Techniques to Help Your Child

Most parents are reluctant to give their children anti-anxiety medications or antidepressants, so cognitive behavioral therapy is often the best answer for treating nervousness in children. In addition, CBT is one of the few therapies that have empirical evidence backing up its effectiveness in the treatment of children. CBT also invites a collaborative approach, as the child works with her therapist to identify goals and methods of obtaining the goals. In fact, parents, teachers, and other family members can all get involved in the CBT approach. Your child will also be given homework assignments to work on while undergoing CBT, so as a parent you can help your child complete these assignments.

There are several cognitive behavioral techniques that can be called upon to help your child combat her anxiety:

• Validity Testing – in which your child is asked to defend a particular mode of thinking, which usually exposes the faulty reasoning on which that belief is founded;
• Cognitive Rehearsal – is when your child is guided through imagining an unpleasant experience in the past, and helped to imagine a positive outcome;
• Journaling – by writing down her daily thoughts and activities, your child can begin to identify bad thought patterns that lead to fearful thinking;
• Guided Discovery – in which the therapist guides your child through a series of questions to help her identify the root of her fear;
• Role-playing – allows a child to act out her response to a stressful situation;
• Positive Reinforcement – the therapist works out a program with the parent that rewards positive behaviors exhibited by the child;
• Aversive Conditioning/Systemic Desensitization – using either a negative reinforcement or a relaxed response when a child is exposed to the fearful situation.

All children are unique, so some techniques may work well for some kids, but not for others. As a parent, you can begin to take note of the types of therapy that work well and then focus on those practices instead.

The Value of a Self-Help Regimen

As a parent, you can complement this cognitive behavioral therapy by adding self-help stress reduction techniques at home. Encourage your child to reduce and release the frustrations of the day by implementing such practices as yoga, meditation, diaphragmatic breathing, and laughter therapy. This is a regimen that can benefit the whole family, so be sure to get everyone involved.

In time, when using a combination of CBT and self-help, you can help your child work through her fears. She’ll also emerge as a stronger person, because she has learned to deal effectively with stress.