Health and Wellbeing
Anxiety: Supporting Teens to Support Themselves
As your teenager grows up, they need to handle their own anxiety, with you close by rather than doing it for them.
- 49 minutes
- 10 modules
- Certificate
Members
Parent membership: all 50 courses for parents and carers, £40 a year or £4 a month after 14 days free.
Already have an account? Sign in
What you'll learn
- Stay present for your teen without rushing in to fix everything
- Help your teen see the link between sleep and how anxious they feel
- Sort worries into what they can control and what they need to accept
- Put together self-soothing strategies your teen can use on their own
- Coach your teen to spot and question anxious, negative thoughts
About this course
You can't sit your teenager's exams for them or smooth every social worry away, however much you'd like to. What you can do is help them learn to manage anxiety themselves, and stay close while they practise.
Some of the ideas are simple, like helping them notice how much worse everything feels after a late night. Others borrow from therapy. Your teen can sort worries into what they can control and what they have to live with, put together a self-soothe box, and become a 'thought detective' who asks whether an anxious thought is really true.
The presenter lives with anxiety herself. Her favourite trick is one your teen might enjoy too, which is to talk to yourself as kindly as you'd talk to your dog.
10 modules
Open in order
- 2 min
Introduction
- 2 min
Wrap Up
- 6 min
Just be there
- 8 min
When in doubt… sleep
- 7 min
Get it out by speaking, writing or creating
- 6 min
Controlling the controllable
- 7 min
Tolerating the uncontrollable
- 6 min
Learning to self-soothe
- 8 min
Noticing negative thoughts
- 3 min
Talking to ourselves like we’d talk to our dog