by Jamie Droke
Child Life Specialist

How to calm your own anxieties.

Over the last several weeks, we have addressed the basics of parent-child anxiety transfer and how to provide helpful distraction for your child during potentially anxiety-provoking situations. The last piece of this topic is how to calm yourself so as to prevent the transfer of anxiety. Even if you know that your anxiety can induce anxiety in your child, if you can't calm yourself down during stressful situations, knowing this information will not be helpful. And while distraction is a great way to prevent anxiety in children, adults cannot always ignore or distract themselves from anxiety-provoking situations. In fact, these anxiety-provoking situations most often demand your full attention. So, how can you lower your own anxiety in situations where anxiety is an appropriate reaction?

The first step is to know your coping strategies. Just as each child has a different coping mechanism, so does each adult. Some children are watchers and some are easily engaged in distraction. Some cope by question-asking and others by avoidance. Once a parent knows a child's coping strategy, helping them cope with stressful experiences becomes much easier. The same is true of us adults. Think about a stressful experience you have faced and what helped get you through. Was it exercise or keeping busy? Was it a strong support system from your family or faith? Or was it getting good rest and good meals? Once you have put some thought into it, most people can determine what their coping style or strategy is. And many people use more than one strategy to cope with difficult situations.

In the situations we most often deal with (an injury or illness in a child), parents have good reason to be anxious. But these anxious parents need a way to cope with their anxiety so that their child does not have heightened anxiety simply because their mom or dad cannot cope well with the stresses associated with the child's illness or injury. In these situations, the first thing I encourage for parents is self-care. Parents need rest and good meals even when (or maybe especially when) their child is in the hospital. I encourage parents to take a break from the hospital to go home and take a nap or shower when possible. I encourage parents to take a break to eat three good meals each day. I tell parents that if they cannot take care of themselves, it will be very difficult for them to care for their sick child.

The second thing I encourage parents to do is to know their limits. If you are a parent who cannot handle the sight of blood, it is perfectly okay to step out during blood draws. If a parent becomes easily overwhelmed when standing or sitting in a child's room, I encourage them to come for short visits and to step out when that feeling of being overwhelmed begins to set in. As we have talked about before, children can sense their mother or father's anxiety and if you become audibly or visibly upset after spending any significant amount of time in the room, it would be a good idea to stay at the bedside for only short visits.

These are just a few simple ideas for coping with the stresses associated with having a child in the hospital. Now I want to hear from you. How do you cope with stress and anxiety?