Seeing your child anxious can be one of the hardest things as a parent. It is hard because none of us like to see our children in pain, and we often don’t know the best way to respond or help. In our last blog post, we discussed ways to teach your child to talk back to anxiety. If you didn’t have a chance to read the blog, check it out here.

Now, we are going to be diving deeper into arguably one of the best ways to help your child minimize anxiety, which is something we call exposure. Exposure simply means taking steps to intentionally do the things your child fears. Remember what we learned in the last blog — Anxiety grows bigger through avoidance. Thus, the primary way for your child to learn that their fears don’t come true is by putting themselves in the feared situation, so they can learn through experience. No more avoidance! And in that process, sometimes your child’s fears do actually come true. However, what children often learn is that it wasn’t as bad as they thought, and ...