Helping Children Overcome Anxiety
Why should helping children overcome anxiety should be a priority? How can you tell your child has anxiety? In this episode of Superpower Mommas, host Tatiana Berindei and guest Tonya Crombie speak about ways to recognize signs of anxiety. What do you do when you realize the symptoms? They will also discuss whether you should encourage your anxious child to do things they don’t want to do. Tune in to know how you can help your child overcome anxiety.Â
Tatiana Berindei:
Hello everyone and welcome to the Superpower Mommas show. I am your host, Tatiana Berindei. And my guest today is Tonya Crombie and we are going to be talking about helping children overcome anxiety. I am really looking forward to this conversation because I have actually struggled with this with my eldest daughter. I’m really looking forward to picking her brain and hearing what she has to say and getting some affirmation for that if I’m doing things right and correct where I may not be. So I’m really, really excited to have her on the show. Let me tell you a little bit about Tonya before we dive in today.
Dr. Tonya Crombie is the best-selling author of Stop Worrying About Your Anxious Child and a certified life coach who likes nothing more than teaching adults how to help children overcome struggles with stress and anxiety. Tonya has a Ph.D. in industrial-organizational psychology and an MBA. However, in addition to being someone with letters behind her name, Tonya’s the mom of two teenagers who’ve had their own struggles with stress, overwhelms, and anxiety. All of her work as a coach, speaker, writer, and facilitator is informed by her experience as a parent of anxious children and is driven by her desire to help young people thrive in the high pressure of the stressful world in which we live. Welcome to the show Tonya, I’m really thrilled to have you here today.
Tonya Crombie:
I’m thrilled to be here with you today.
Tatiana Berindei:
Before we dive into our conversation, will you tell our listeners what your superpowers are in this arena of helping children with their anxieties?
Tonya Crombie:
My superpower, I would say probably the biggest one is just simply having a whole lot of compassion for people who struggle because I have been there and I can feel love and compassion. I’ve had so many clients and parents talk to me about things that they’re ashamed of, things that they wish they would’ve done differently. Things they wish they would’ve seen earlier. And with every one of their stories, I can always say me too. So that is probably what I bring to this work, it’s just a lot of love and compassion for people who are going through it because I have been there too. I’ve done it wrong more than I’ve done it right and so there’s no judgment and no shame with me.
Tatiana Berindei:
I love that. I think it’s so important to have those judgment-free spaces. So thank you for offering that. And we are going to go for a quick break before we really get into the meat of our conversation. But I thought maybe before we break, we could give just a little bit of what is anxiety and how does it presents in children? What are some of the signs?
Tonya Crombie:
That’s one of the trickiest things. It doesn’t look like we expect it to look a lot of the time and what I thought, and remember, this is not my superpower. I have a Ph.D. in psychology. I taught child development and when it was my own child, I missed those signs. I didn’t pick up on it for a very long time because what I thought it would look like was a child who was biting her fingernails and afraid. And actually, she did bite her fingernails in all fairness, but I didn’t put that with anxiety. I thought it was the I’m afraid of everything, I’m afraid of my own shadow. I’m afraid to do things and to say I am afraid that children don’t have always the emotional awareness to even know that what they’re feeling is fear and what it often looks like is anger. It looks like temper tantrums.
It looks like the inability to sit still because they’re feeling all this stuff and so they’re wiggling their bodies. Anxiety is a tricky one. It can look like what we have thought of as an attention deficit disorder, that inability to focus and sit still because they are feeling so much anxiety lives in our body and they’re feeling all of this body sensation and so they’re wiggling around and their brains are not in the prefrontal cortex where they do their good thinking and learning, it’s all in the back lizard part of our brain where we aren’t really clear and focused. So again, it looks kind of like a tension deficit, but it’s not, it’s anxiety.
Tatiana Berindei:
We’re definitely going to dive into more of this because you’re hitting close to home here. I mean, we’ve done a lot of work with our eldest daughter and we have some situational things that I have already seen as we’ve corrected some of our experiences, some of those patterns are starting to lessen and there’s still this underlying piece. And I love the name of your book, Stop Worrying About Your Anxious Child, which was just so on point, right? Because we do and then we’re introducing more anxiety into the mix and the process, so okay. All of this is really good. We’re going to dive into it but we’re going to go to a break before we do, will you tell our listeners where they can go to find out more about you and to get your books and all the rest?
Tonya Crombie:
Yeah. The easiest place to find everything is at guidanceforthefuture.com where you can learn about me. I think there’re links to get my books there. There’re links to go see my videos on YouTube and to follow me on Facebook or Instagram. It’s a one-stop-shop. You can find everything at guidanceforthefuture.com.
Tatiana Berindei:
Fabulous. Thank you for that. And to our listeners, if you have not come and check out our membership yet, what are you waiting for? We have this amazing membership that we’ve put together, all these incredible offerings. There’s something happening every week for you to dive into and participate in. And there’s also a lot of events that we’re offering. You can engage with just one event or you can become a member and get all of the events. Please come and check that out over at superpowerexperts.com. There’s a lot of good stuff there. So go and check that out. We are talking with Tonya Crombie about helping children overcome anxiety, and we are going to dive in deep when we get back. So stay tuned, we’ll be right back.
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