How To Manage Anxiety In Teenage Children: A Guide For Parents
The words “teenage children” are so hard for people to grasp sometimes. Once a child hits their teens, their behavior seems to change so much that they don’t appear to be a “child” in the most obvious sense anymore. Suddenly they have a lot more responsibilities and only slightly greater capacities for actually dealing with them.
This is the essential starting point of most anxiety. Some anxiety stays there, allowing the child to grow into a young adult healthily. But if the anxiety grows out of proportion with the child’s ability to handle it, then they will be far less functional going into adulthood.
As their caretaker in this transitional period, it is your job to make someone who is not quite a child and not yet an adult strong enough to deal with the natural anxieties of the world. And yes, if they are experiencing unnatural anxiety, you have to deal with that too.
But how does one help someone deal with their anxieties? And what are anxieties anyways?
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What is Anxiety?
Like all other feelings in the human body, anxiety is a product of chemistry. But there is another layer to it that most people are more familiar with, and that is anxiety as a state of mind.
Thinking of anxiety as exclusively a chemical reaction or exclusively a state of mind is not totally correct. It can be helpful; some people are much calmer when they think of their anxiety as something happening to them, rather than something they are causing with their thoughts.
On the flip side, some people are able to calm down by thinking anxiety as a thought pattern that they have control over. Neither is totally right or totally wrong. But let’s go into deeper detail as to how both thoughts and chemicals shape anxiety.
The Chemicals that Cause Anxiety
How the human brain works is that electrical signals command certain regions of the brain to produce certain hormones, which are then used to send signals to the nerves to feel certain feelings. The feeling of anxiety, for example is caused by noradrenaline.
