Weighted Blankets and More: Easing Anxiety in Your Child

 Anxiety isn’t something that only impacts adults. It can affect people of all ages, including children. Childhood anxiety is more common than you may realize. A general sense of uneasiness, social pressure, schoolwork, and separation from parents are all factors. Anxiety can affect your child’s emotional, mental, and physical well-being.

Thankfully, some tools and strategies can help your child feel safe, secure, and grounded. Let’s explore how items like weighted blankets can serve as complementary approaches to easing anxiety in children. And how these approaches can also provide you, as the parent, with peace of mind.

Weighted Blankets

The teen years are already challenging, but social media can add an extra layer of increased anxiety and stress. Your teen may feel pressure to respond to comments, replies, or direct messages in real time. Teens can also experience stress from their posts not performing well or receiving enough likes, comments, or shares. They can also find themselves experiencing a fear of missing out, or FOMO, if they weren’t included in one of their friends’ or classmates’ posts.

Create and Stick to a Structure and Routine

Another great tool to help support emotional regulation and reduce anxiety is by creating and sticking to a structure and routine.

A lot of anxiety comes from the unknown. Children feel a lot safer when they know what to expect. Having a set plan in place can help reduce some of the uncertainty, as well as the anxiety, of those unknowns. This means having consistent wake-up times, meals, school, and bedtimes. Predictable routines can help children know what to expect.

Mindfulness Techniques

The teenage years can come with a lot of mood swings as it is, but social media can add to these behavioral changes. Pay attention to how your teen acts or behaves after they get done on social media. If they show signs of being agitated, irritated, down, or withdrawn after social media use, a post or message from social media could be the culprit.

Creative Expression

The comparison game can be a constant on social media. Teens will often compare their own looks, lifestyle, and popularity to what they see online. They may even question why their own life doesn’t look like their friends, classmates, or the influencers or celebrities that they follow. The comparison game can shape how a teen feels about themselves.

Sensory Tools

Pay attention to how often your teen is hanging out with family members or friends. Are they spending more time online scrolling on social media instead of making real-life, genuine connections with others face-to-face? If you’re noticing that they’re withdrawing from others, making excuses on why they can’t hang out, or skipping extracurricular activities and hobbies, it could be a sign that social media is starting to take over their life.

Seek Additional Support

Your child’s anxiety is not a reflection of you or your parenting. You’re also not expected to have all of the answers, especially if you don’t deal with anxiety yourself. One of the best things you can do to help your child and yourself is to reach out to a licensed and trained mental health professional.

A therapist can work with your child to help teach them additional coping skills that can help challenge and change those unwanted thoughts and feelings to help them build resilience. If you’re interested in exploring therapy options for your child struggling with anxiety, reach out today