how to work with kids with anxiety (without making the anxiety bigger).
By Luke Mihail, Lumi Counselling - Geelong
I had a young person come into Lumi recently who had already had quite a few adults try to help them. Everyone meant well. There had been questions, encouragement, conversations about feelings and plenty of attempts to understand what was happening underneath the anxiety. But by the time they came to see me, they had become pretty good at shutting adults out. The answers were short, there was a lot of “I don’t know”, eye contact was limited, and any attempt to move the conversation towards feelings seemed to make the wall go up even higher.
So I tried something different. I stopped trying to talk about the anxiety.
We did something together instead. We played, moved around, talked about ordinary things and took the pressure right off. There was no expectation that this young person needed to tell me what was wrong simply because they had walked into a counselling room. Slowly, a few words became sentences. There was some humour. The conversation became easier. Then, while we were doing something that had very little to do with counselling on the surface, they told me something important about what had been happening for them.
It wasn’t because I had finally found the perfect therapeutic question. I think it happened because, for a while, they stopped feeling like another adult was trying to get something out of them.
That experience probably captures one of the things I have learned over many years of working with children and teenagers. When kids are anxious, the adults around them are usually trying incredibly hard to help. Parents want to understand what is going on. Teachers want to make school manageable. Professionals want to give them strategies and help them move forward. All of that comes from a good place, but sometimes we can become so focused on fixing the anxiety that the young person starts to feel like they are the problem being worked on.
(Some details in this example have been changed to protect the young person’s privacy.)
Anxiety doesn’t always look like… well, anxiety.
One of the difficult things about anxiety in children is that it does not always look like a child telling us they are worried. Sometimes it does, but it can also look like anger, avoidance, perfectionism, silliness, headaches, refusing school, becoming controlling, needing a parent constantly nearby or answering “I don’t know” every time an adult asks a question.
That is why I think we need to be careful about judging what is happening based only on the behaviour we can see. A child refusing to walk through the school gate might not be trying to make the morning difficult. A teenager refusing to speak with a counsellor might not be unwilling to engage. A child who becomes argumentative every time there is a birthday party or social event might not simply be “playing up”. Sometimes there is anxiety underneath the behaviour, even if the young person cannot explain it yet.
That does not mean every behaviour gets excused. Kids still need boundaries, expectations and adults who can hold those things calmly. But understanding what might be driving a behaviour changes the way we respond. Instead of immediately asking, “How do we stop this behaviour?”, it can be much more useful to wonder, “What is this child trying to manage right now?”
Connection has to come before strategy.
I use plenty of practical tools with kids at Lumi. We might talk about what their brain is telling them, learn ways to ground themselves, explore anxious thoughts or work out the small steps they can take towards something they have been avoiding. Those strategies can be really useful, but I do not think they get very far if the young person does not trust the person sitting beside them.
Children are very good at picking up when adults have an agenda. If every car ride becomes a check-in about feelings, every difficult moment becomes a lesson about regulation and every counselling session feels like a series of questions, some young people simply stop talking. That is why counselling with kids does not always look like what people imagine counselling should look like.
Sometimes my job is to play chess. Sometimes we kick a footy around. Sometimes we draw on the whiteboard or play a game while we talk. Sometimes a child spends ten minutes telling me about something they love and I know absolutely nothing about it, so I let them teach me. From the outside, that can look like we are not doing much. In reality, the young person is learning something pretty important: Is this adult going to push me? Are they actually interested in me? Can I get something wrong here? Do I have to talk about difficult things before I am ready?
When a child starts to feel safe, the important conversations often find their way into the room without needing to be dragged there. I think the same principle matters at home. Parents do not need to turn every interaction into therapy. Sometimes the best thing you can do for an anxious child is spend time with them without trying to change anything. Let them know, through the way you are with them, that you enjoy their company even when nothing is being fixed.
Helping doesn’t always mean making the anxiety disappear.
The other challenge is that adults naturally want to remove anxiety. Watching a child struggle is uncomfortable. We want to reassure them, give them certainty or take away whatever is causing the distress. Sometimes that is exactly what a child needs, but if it becomes our response every time anxiety appears, we can accidentally teach them that they cannot move forward until somebody else makes the feeling disappear.
You often see this through repeated reassurance. A child asks, “What if something happens?”, “What if you’re late?”, “What if I feel sick?” or “What if nobody talks to me?” The natural response is to reassure them that everything will be okay. There is nothing wrong with that. The problem is when the same question comes back five minutes later, because at that point the reassurance has settled the anxiety temporarily without really helping the child build confidence in their own ability to cope.
Over time, I like to shift the message slightly. Instead of promising that nothing uncomfortable will happen, we can communicate that we believe the child can manage whatever comes next. “I’m not sure exactly what will happen, but we’ll work it out.” “You might feel nervous, but I still think you can do it.” That is different from leaving them alone with the fear. The message is still, “I’m here with you”, but it also says, “I don’t think you need anxiety to disappear before you can take another step.”
That is an important distinction because the goal is not really to create kids who never feel anxious. Anxiety is part of being human. The goal is to help young people become less frightened of the fact that they are anxious.
Progress is often much smaller than we expect.
Adults naturally think about the destination. We want the child attending school again, sleeping independently, joining the group, talking to the counsellor or doing the thing they have been avoiding. For the young person, though, that end goal can feel enormous.
Sometimes we need to make the next step much smaller.
For one child, progress might simply be getting dressed for school. For another, it might be driving to the school and staying in the car. The next step might be walking through the gate, then spending part of the morning there. For a young person coming to counselling, progress might be walking through the door willingly, staying for half an hour or simply playing a game with me without feeling pressured to talk.
None of those things look dramatic, but they matter because confidence tends to grow through experience. Every time a child does something difficult while anxiety is present, they get another piece of evidence that says, “I felt nervous and I still managed it.”
That is why I often think the better question is not, “How do we get them all the way there?” It is, “What is the next brave step that is actually manageable from where this child is today?”
Why parents and professionals need to work together.
Another thing I see all the time is how different the same child can look depending on where they are. A teacher may genuinely say, “We don’t really see any anxiety at school,” while the parent describes a child who gets into the car at the end of the day and completely falls apart. Neither person is necessarily wrong. They are seeing the same young person in different environments.
Some children hold themselves together all day and release everything when they reach the place where they feel safest. Others are relaxed and confident at home but become highly anxious in social or academic settings. This is one of the reasons collaboration between parents, schools, counsellors and other allied health professionals can make such a difference.
Parents know things about their child that I will never see in a counselling room. Teachers see how that child manages friendships, learning and the demands of a classroom. OTs, speech pathologists and other professionals may notice patterns that the rest of us have missed. When appropriate and with the right consent, sharing those observations gives us a much better picture of the young person than any of us can build alone.
I do not think one professional needs to have all the answers. In fact, some of the best work happens when nobody is trying to be the expert on the whole child. We each bring our piece, communicate well and make sure the young person is surrounded by adults who are pulling in roughly the same direction.
The goal isn’t an anxiety-free child.
If there is one thing I would want parents to take away from this, it is that your child feeling anxious does not automatically mean something is going wrong. A difficult morning does not erase the progress of the last month. A child needing reassurance one day does not mean they have forgotten everything they have learned. Progress with anxiety is rarely neat.
We are trying to help young people gradually understand what is happening inside them, learn that uncomfortable feelings can be tolerated and discover that anxiety does not have to make every decision for them. Sometimes that involves strategies and therapeutic work. Sometimes it involves exposure to something that has been avoided. Sometimes it involves parents changing the way they respond to reassurance seeking.
And sometimes it begins much more simply.
It begins with taking the pressure off long enough for a child to realise that the adult beside them is not there to force a conversation, demand the right answer or “fix” them. They are there to understand them.
For that young person who came into Lumi, that was where we started. Not with anxiety. Not with a worksheet. Not even with much talking.
We started with connection.
And once that was there, we had something to work with.
At Lumi Counselling, I work alongside children, teenagers, parents and other professionals across Geelong, the Bellarine Peninsula and Surf Coast. My approach is practical, relational and focused on meeting young people where they are, rather than expecting them to fit neatly into what counselling is supposed to look like.
