In Part 1 of our story to mark Mental Health Awareness Week, we talked to Kiwi mums who were anxious about their children amid a cost-of-living crisis. In Part 2, we ask an expert for advice on how to help anxious kids open up and deal with the stressors and pressures of today’s world
Is anyone anxious about their child being anxious in an anxiety-inducing world? And is the cost-of-living crisis adding to those worries? If so, you’re far from alone. Released by the Employers and Manufacturers Association (EMA) and the healthcare insurer nib, New Zealand’s 2024 Workplace Wellbeing survey shows that two-thirds of New Zealanders are concerned about financial security for them and their household, up from half of Kiwis in 2022. Also, two-thirds of New Zealanders are more worried about the mental health and wellbeing of their families (up from 56% in 2022) than they are about their own mental health (55%).
Nathan Wallis, nib’s resident parenting expert, is a father and foster parent with a professional background in child counselling, teaching, lecturing and social-service management. He facilitates professional development training that reflects the latest neuroscience discoveries – and has delivered hundreds of presentations nationally and internationally about how neuroscience can better inform our day-to-day interactions with children and young people.
So, why are so many parents worried about their kids? Is this just a matter of parents being parents? Either way, if we’re worried, we’re worried – so what can we do about it? “Well,” Nathan says, “it’s partly that age-old thing of parents just worry about their kids.” But he also says that parents are right to have concerns.
“Adults tend to be more resilient than children, who have got more risk factors going on – and today’s world is perhaps a more vulnerable time for children to live in.” Young people today face probably more, and very different, challenges than their parents had in childhood. “So as parents, we can’t just ‘glide’. We have to proactively do something.”
It’s not always easy to get children to open up, but Nathan says keep trying. “Ruminating is a problem. In mental health, for adults and children, about 90% of [dealing with] it is about getting it out of your head. If they don’t articulate things, children can get some quite warped thinking.”
“I’d suggest that a parent puts aside a dedicated time every week to sit down with their child, because predictability is so important to children’s brains. So, your child knows that, at that specific time, Mum’s going to give me 10 minutes of her full attention. She’s not going to check her cellphone. She’s not going to talk to any other children. She’s not going to do any multitasking. She’s going to be fully, emotionally, physically, mentally present.” The same goes for fathers.
“Doing this shows children that they’re important and that you’re prioritising them. For children, that’s priceless. Quality time really matters.”
What To Say To An Anxious Kid
Whether you or your child prompts the conversation, ask them how they’re feeling. “Validate how they feel, and don’t dismiss it, because how they feel is very real. You could say ‘oh honey, it must be really difficult to feel that level of anxiety’.”
He suggests following up a validation like that with a proactive statement. “You could ask ‘what do you think we could do about it?’. Tolerable stress [as opposed to toxic stress] is when you can say ‘here’s a stressor’ and look at what you can do.”
Nathan’s number one suggestion is to look at your child’s diet and exercise. Even just walking to the mailbox can help with anxiety. Incidental exercise like walking to school can be baked into the schedule. “In the research, the link between physical health and mental health keeps getting stronger.”
Can Your Children Sense Your Stress?
“I think that experiencing a cost-of-living crisis has a bigger impact than many people understand, when it comes to how much stress it adds,” Nathan says. “Because your ability to provide for your family is so fundamental to everything.”
Can children sense your stress? Yes. “No matter how much parents try to hide it, our own stress levels come across in what we say and do.”
You can shelter kids to a certain extent, but Nathan thinks it’s important not to shield them from everything. ‘Because then you shield them from seeing that you can feel and manage stress. This way, you model to your child that you can have a fear but be resilient to it anyway.”
“Talk about what it’s possible to do something about.” For instance, you could say that the cost of living is high right now, but that this is our budget and we’ll get by.
What if it’s something we can’t do much about, like climate change? “Validate them by saying something like ‘you’re right to be concerned about climate change because it’s scary’. Also you could say something like ‘did you know that every generation as humans has faced something where they didn’t know what’s going to happen? We have to live with ‘not knowing’. But for thousands of years, we’ve kept going’.”
Social Media & Anxiety In Kids
Nathan recommends limiting young people’s time on social media. “We’ve understood for a while that social media correlates with negative outcomes. Now, there’s an increasing body of evidence showing that it’s causative.” Especially when it comes to young people comparing themselves to others.
But won’t they say ‘Mum, you’re being mean, everyone else gets to do it!’? “Explain that it’s not arbitrary. Explain your reasons. For instance, tell your child that their 35-year-old self will look back and say ‘that was good parenting’.”
Something else that is good parenting? Looking after yourself. Even if it’s just taking 10 minutes a day to do some mindfulness meditation, Nathan ways. “That will affect the wellbeing of your kids as well.”
The Reality of the ‘Harden Up’ Myth
A recent NZ Herald story explained that Christchurch’s Hagley College would be starting an initiative that “hopes to help students struggling with attendance due to extracurricular activities or sickness and mental health concerns by giving 20 NCEA Level 2 students the choice of part-time studying from home in a new trial”. That would involve them doing three days of in-person learning at school and two days of learning from home through video calls.
Education specialist Derek Wenmoth, who helped Hagley College to design the trial, told Newstalk ZB’s Heather du Plessis-Allan that other countries have programmes specifically targeting students struggling with issues like anxiety.
It was quite the hot topic at Newstalk ZB, because Kerre Woodham then got Auckland Grammar headmaster Tim O’Connor on the phone. His personal view is that students need to show up to class, in person, every weekday.
“I’m over resilience,” he said. “I think resilience is now a cliche and we actually need to be teaching them to be less fragile.” He added that “it does seem to me that the society we’re living in is too readily accepting of every wellbeing measure possible”.
Nathan thinks differently. “Throughout history, every older generation has said that every generation of teenagers is slack or lazy. But they’re not adults, they’re adolescents. Teenagers are vulnerable to every stressor that comes in adolescence. Their brains are still developing and we can’t talk to them like adults and say they just need to ‘harden up’.”
Building resilience, not expecting them to ‘harden up’, is where it’s at. And we can help our children do that.
