How becoming a coach can help reduce your child's anxiety
Suzie Grazier 
4 strategies taken from coaching to help parents to support their child in becoming more confident and resilient.
Parenting is hard.
But let’s face it, parenting an anxious child is even harder and guaranteed to challenge even the best parents among us.
Children don't come with a manual so there is no how to guide telling us how to help when they struggle.
Even the most easy-going, laid-back parent can become anxious or stressed when they are seeing their child struggle and don’t know how to help. Their distress is your distress.
Taking off the parent hat and becoming a coach can be a really helpful approach that gets positive outcomes.
Coaching is a way of developing people through conversation and is underpinned by the following principles:
- An unconditional positive regard
- belief in ability to succeed
- encouragement + motivation
- firm boundaries
- creating independence rather than dependence.
These principles also run through my parent led CBT programme and I have seen it create amazing outcomes time and time again.
Using these principles in parenting an anxious child you can harness the power of the unconscious mind to share positive messages with children and encourage them to become more confident and independent.
Adopting this approach can also encourage self-compassion. By believing you are doing the best that you can for your child, remaining optimistic and believing you can succeed makes it more likely that you will.
To adopt a coaching approach there are 4 fundamental steps you need to take:
1. Listen
Communication with our kids is very often hurried and influenced by our busy schedule and our own stresses/emotional state. It is essential to spend quality time together and provide a safe space for your child to talk about emotions.
When you do so it is imperative that you hold back from offering your own opinions and just listen without judgement.
Even 5-10 Minutes per day built into a regular routine will go a long way when carried out correctly and consistently.
2. Give responsibility
As parents we take on the responsibility of protecting our kids. As a result, we try to teach and guide them by telling them what we would do or what we think they should do in difficult situations.
What they learn from this is that they need you to manage difficult situations for them and they become clingy and reliant on you.
Research shows that children learn best by doing things for themselves.
Therefore, when you take a step back and encourage them to solve their own problems you will begin to see them grow in confidence.
3. Be forgiving
To yourself and your children.
You are all just doing your best and it is perfectly normal to make mistakes. We often learn a lot from these mistakes so instead of holding yourself or your kids to an impossibly high standard, try finding the lesson in each experience and ask for help when you need it.
4. Ask Coaching questions
A good coach never tells a client what they think they should do.
They don't give advice - they ask questions to support their client to come to their own conclusions and find solutions to their problems that they can believe and act upon.
Try to ask questions that open up conversations - questions that begin with who/what/how/when can inspire more creative thinking and lead to more meaningful conversations.
Putting these coaching strategies into practice should help you to support your child's emotional wellbeing and open up opportunities to become more confident and resilient.
But remember, Rome wasn’t built in a day.
It’s all in the practice and being consistent. Your child may even become frustrated to begin with when you stop telling them what to do and start asking questions but eventually they will get used to it and become more independent, flexible thinkers.
Let me know how it goes by dropping me an email to suzie@thinkwisepwp.com
I'd love to hear about your successes and challenges.
