How do I find a balance between pushing our anxious children and accommodating their anxiety?
Uh, I think part of that is educating your child on anxiety and giving them resources and tools to understand how to deal with anxiety. So the way that we would do that, Michelle, is to help our children understand what anxiety is. So we don't wanna be afraid, we wanna educate children. This is how anxiety manifests.
There's different parts of it. One is physiological. Your body's gonna feel anxious. Your heart may be pumping a little bit more, your hands might be sweaty, and you might feel some tingling. So you're teaching your children about physiological symptoms of anxiety, and then we're also helping them understand how to address it.
Now again, many parents are concerned with anxiety. So here's a couple quick tidbits for all of us. If you go to Google and you type in "the basic exercise"—if I had more time, I would give a little more information about anxiousness in general.
When any of us feel anxious, really what that's saying is our emotional center, the amygdala—that’s the emotional center of the brain—is fired up. It's feeling like, "Do I need to fight? Do I need to run away? What do I need to do?" So when we are feeling anxious physiologically, our body is saying, "There’s something going on here. There's something off. You need to pay closer attention."
Back in the old days, it might’ve been on the savannah where we were afraid of a tiger attacking. Well, today in 2025, our tiger might be the internet, being bullied at school, or fear of failing a test. And so we start to feel anxious in those situations.
What we're trying to do is educate our children on how to respond. And by the way, this is good for all of us. It’s really helpful to recognize that we need to regulate our autonomic nervous system, which is our fight or flight response.
The way we do that is by accessing what's called the vagus, or vagal nerve. It's the longest nerve in the body, and what it does is it acts like the brake of our emotional system. So when we activate the vagus nerve, it basically tells the rest of the body, "It’s okay. Calm down. Take a few deep breaths."
The basic exercise is a really simple way to access the vagus nerve. You can look it up—it’s about a three-minute exercise. Try it, practice it, and see what happens. You’d be surprised at how much that simple exercise can help you feel calmer.
Other things you can do include deep breathing exercises, going for a walk in nature, or other calming activities. These are ways to naturally reduce anxiety.
Another important factor is social connectedness. If I'm feeling anxious, someone just taking my hand and holding it might actually help calm me.
One of the things I learned early on—I have a daughter who’s had more anxiety than my other children, or at least it was more noticeable. When she was younger, she was really hard. She had a lot of emotional outbursts and trouble making sense of things.
What I learned is that if I would go up to her and gently hum by her head, it would help. For her, it was about feeling touch and soothing through sound. What I didn’t realize at the time was that sound can be very soothing.
So those are some strategies to help your child soothe their anxious mind. And you can find more resources online about accessing the vagus nerve. That would be my suggestion for all of us: when we can regulate our vagus nerve and our stress or anxiety, we feel more in control.
That’s what we want our children to understand: when you feel anxious, there are resources and strategies you can use that will help.
