5 Ways to Feed Your Teen’s Anxiety

It was 8 p.m. on a Friday, and I noticed my daughter lounging on the sofa, glued to her phone. “I thought you were going to Shelly’s house with the gang tonight,” I said curiously. She glanced up and shrugged. “I don’t really feel like it.” Avoiding social situations had begun to be a pattern with her. She was also struggling with headaches and sleeping. All the signs were beginning to point to an unhealthy increase in anxiety.

The more my wife and I began to talk with our daughter about it, the more we realized that while we weren’t responsible, there were certain patterns we’d developed that were feeding her teen anxiety. Perhaps you’ve inadvertently fallen into some of the same habits. Here are 5 ways to feed your teen’s anxiety.

1. Keep her busy.

My wife and I are not good at resting. We both tend to fill our calendars in ways that keep us moving. Add four children, all within 5 years of each other, involved in sports with active social lives, and you can imagine that things can get a bit busy. This isn’t all bad, but it’s also not all good. In fact, one of the downsides of this type of life is that you tend to squeeze out extra free time. We realized that for our kids, just having some time to breathe and relax without running to the next thing was a rarity. An overloaded schedule can be a real contributing factor to teen anxiety.

Rest is countercultural for us, but we need to learn how to build rest into our everyday busy lives. My wife and I decided on a PTO system for our kids, where they could actually request time off from school. They had a certain number of days available, and as long as they had time in their bank, they didn’t need a good reason. It became a bit of a relief valve and gave a sense of agency over their schedules.

2. Focus on performance.

We chose our school district because of its high academic performance. While our kids were well prepared for their college studies, we came to realize that high performance often came with pressure and expectations. For example, when we met with their guidance counselor, who discussed their future trajectory, the example that was shared with each of our four teens was of a student who had scored a 1500 on his SATs and got admitted to Harvard. On the one hand, I love to set a high bar. On the other hand, it began to fuel a narrative about what it meant to be successful academically, and that was completely unrealistic for each of our kids. It really fed into their teen anxiety.

As we began to see this negatively impacting our teens, it challenged us to talk with them about why, sometimes, a “B” might actually be a solid grade. Or why there’s more to a successful resume than just a high GPA. It also impacted the types of questions we asked. We tried to focus more on preparation and learning than on test scores.

3. Be unavailable.

My wife and I are fortunate that during our kids’ teen years, our jobs gave us lots of flexibility so we could show up to sporting events and be present for dinner most nights. Yet, it also meant we often took unstructured time around those things and filled them with work. We began to realize that it was hard for our teens to get uninterrupted time with us. And teen anxiety thrives in isolation.

So we began making some changes. Some of it was as simple as setting our phones down or just choosing to take fewer evening meetings. But some of it was very intentional. With one of my daughters, the one thing that could cheer her up was a car ride and some music, so when I noticed she was in a funk, I would drop what I was doing and say, “Let’s go for a drive.” With another, we began walking every morning before school. Neither activity was convenient, but both created a space in which my teens felt I was accessible when they needed to talk.

4. Assume she’ll ask about it.

It’s easy when you feel busy to just keep your head down until you see a problem pop up. So if your teen isn’t saying anything, you assume everything is OK. We did that for a while, then we began to notice that our daughter was becoming increasingly withdrawn. She wasn’t rebelling or screaming at us; she was just becoming smaller and smaller, isolating herself from us and others, not saying a thing.

We had to stop and begin asking her questions. Not accusatory questions, but genuine questions about how she was doing, what she was thinking, and how we could help her. If you know teen anxiety, you know we didn’t often get answers. But slowly, over time, we learned how to ask better questions, leave space for silence, but also communicate our love and support, whatever the answer might be.

5. Feed your own anxiety.

It’s hard to give what you don’t have. If you are regularly anxious and you feed it with doomscrolling, murder podcasts, or ruminating on all the worst-case scenarios, then she’ll do one of two things. Either your anxiety will become her anxiety, or she’ll simply decide that you are not the kind of person who can actually help her since you’re just as anxious as she is, so she won’t talk to you. Worse, she may withhold sharing anything with you because she wants to protect you, since you can’t manage your own anxiety.

We’ve had to learn to deal honestly and directly with our own anxieties, recognizing that the most important thing we can do for our teens is model the kind of life we want them to have. This includes seeing counselors, but it also includes simply employing some of the same tactics we’ve tried to use to help them: choosing rest and being present for one another.

Check out this All Pro Dad podcast where the team discusses how parental expectations are crushing our kids, especially our teens.

Sound off: Is anxiety something you’ve seen in your teens? If so, what have you used to support them?