How to Help Your Child (and Yourself) With Back-to-School Anxiety

So let's briefly talk about why school is anxiety provoking, why the return to school is anxiety provoking for most people.

I don't even know if I have to explain this to you, but when we do something new, when we change things about our lives, especially when we don't control all of the aspects, it is normal for human beings to feel anxious.

Imagine if you had to change your job every single year.

New boss, new colleagues, and you couldn't even quit, right? That's what going to school is like for kids.

When you think about it, it's kind of wild that they cope with such a big transition every single year, all the way up through college.

And if they do graduate school, it continues.

So it's a lot of change.

And it's a lot of unpredictability.

And it's a lot of not exactly knowing what will happen.

And most of us don't even know who our teachers for our kids are going to be until the week before school.

So we can't even really prepare in advance for that change.

However, being anxious doesn't mean that we don't do things.

A lot of life is taking calculated risks, being in a new situation despite feeling anxious about it.

So knowing how we're going to talk to our kids about this kind of transition, about this kind of change can be really helpful.

And knowing that there are specific things that we can say to them to help them understand where their anxiety is coming from and that they're going to be able to handle difficult situations without being alone, without overly reassuring them and telling them that things will be fine and perfect, even though we can't make those kinds of promises.

That's really the goal when we're helping kids manage school anxiety.

Now, I'm going to give you a caveat.

I feel like I always have a caveat.

Today, we're talking about what to do when kids are experiencing normative anxiety.

So a little bit of the worries, a little bit of the what-ifs, a little bit of the unsures.

This is different than an anxiety disorder.

So a level where your anxiety is really interfering with your child's ability to go to school.

Your child's anxiety is making it hard for them to separate from you.

These are still helpful things to say, but if you're running into a real deep fear reaction from your child about going to school, this is where you probably want to be in more intensive anxiety treatment.

Or if there's something going on with the school that is so bad that your child's anxiety actually makes sense, like if their school is actually a scary place to go, if there really are bad things happening there, then helping them process their anxiety is not going to actually fix the situation because the school itself is the problem and their anxiety actually makes sense in that situation.