Things You Learn in Therapy
Things You Learn in Therapy
Is this NORMAL?? WORRY -->Understanding Childhood Worry And What To Do About It
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Exclusive access to premium content!Kids rarely say “I’m anxious.” They show you instead—with stomach aches before school, a sudden snap over small things, or long nights staring at the ceiling. We dig into what childhood worry really looks like, why it often seems illogical, and how to respond in ways that lower the alarm rather than shut kids down.
We start by mapping the many faces of worry: physical complaints, anger that masks fear, and quiet withdrawal that gets misread as defiance. Then we connect the dots to common triggers—school transitions, shifting friendships, family changes, and the unsettling sight of a sick caregiver. The pandemic left a residue of safety fears for many kids; even a routine illness can spark an outsized reaction when their nervous system links “not normal” with “not safe.” Naming that link helps you meet the need beneath the noise.
From there, we share clear, practical tools. Swap “Don’t worry” for “I can see this is bothering you—what is your brain saying?” Validate the size of the feeling, then co‑regulate with slow breaths so teaching can stick. Use a simple 0–10 worry scale to spot patterns, celebrate small drops, and guide your response in real time. Protect sleep with predictable routines, limit late screens, and add steady anchors like movement and time with a trusted person who helps your child feel grounded. If worry keeps disrupting school, friendships, or home life, it may be time to bring in a therapist and build skills through structured support.
By the end, you’ll have scripts that work, a map for those spike moments when a parent is down sick, and a plan to help your child name and tame fear without shame. If this conversation helps, subscribe, share it with a friend who needs it, and leave a quick review—what phrase will you try at home tonight?
www.bethtrammell.com
Hello, listener. Thanks for tuning in today. I'm Dr. Beth Tremell. I'm a licensed psychologist and I'm the host of Kids These Days. Thanks for being here. Uh, you know, this is the third in a series of four episodes where I'm talking about, you know, is this normal? You know, do I need to see a therapist for this for my kid? Is this something that they'll grow out of? These are really common questions that people often ask me. And today's episode is about worry. Now, worry is a branch of anxiety. So if you think about anxiety as sort of the overall heading, worry is one of the kind of branches under anxiety. And it may come up looking like fear, it may look like whining. I see kids who have a lot of worry and they complain about stomach aches or headaches, they may have trouble sleeping, changes in appetite, any of these things may be symptoms of worry. And while it's really normal for a kid to have uh, you know, a bellyache or a headache from time to time, if the origin is worry, then we want to try to address the worry, even if they can't articulate it. I mean, that's one of the biggest struggles for parents is that we miss it. You know, we think, well, there's nothing for them to worry about. What are they worried about? You know, we don't see it as worry, we see it as them having stomach problems, or we see it as them being a whiner, when in fact the origin of their behavior may be actually in worry. It may also come up for your kiddo, and it may look like anger or disrespect. Because for kids, worry is really just this feeling of being off or just kind of scared or fearful, but they can't necessarily say those things. They just know they don't feel right on the inside, and they can't always necessarily even tell you that they don't feel right on the inside. They may just come off as angry or disrespectful or quiet or withdrawn. And so if you're starting to see some of these things and they become a pattern, then you may start to look for kind of more underlying anxiety, worry, depression kinds of things. Worry is really common in kids, especially young kids and even teenagers, especially if they're going through any kind of change. For example, changes in friendships, right? Maybe there is um, you know, someone who moved away, or maybe there's a new student in class. Maybe they have transitioned from middle school to high school, maybe they transitioned from elementary to middle school. Those transition years are among the highest rates of uh, you know, kind of mental health struggles, including anxiety, depression, and worry. Maybe there's a divorce going on, a change in uh the home environment. Maybe you got a new pet. Maybe your pet passed away. Any of those things may be a trigger for a child to start having increased worry, even about things that don't make sense to you, even about things that aren't necessarily directly related to the change. So keep in mind that worry is illogical by nature. It doesn't make sense. Your worry doesn't make sense either. My worry doesn't make sense either. I know, I know in my head that my worry isn't the truth, but it doesn't keep in my heart, in my in my inside, it doesn't keep it from feeling true. And that's how our kids experience worry as well. The last thing I'll say here about worry for this episode, and there's probably a lot more to say. And if you have a question about worry, or if your kid's having a particular challenge, feel free to shoot me an email and I can cover more about worry on a future episode. But the last thing I'll say here is, you know, I've had a lot of kids in my um, you know, in my years of experience that when a parent becomes sick, particularly a parent who becomes so sick that they are kind of not functioning in some way. So maybe you get the flu and you're down for like five or six days. Maybe you um have, you know, pneumonia, maybe there's some kind of pretty significant sickness where you're not functioning the way you typically function. You might see a spike in worry from your kids around that time also, because even though you tell them you're okay, they may not necessarily be able to control the worry they have, because at the heart of their deepest fear is that something will happen to you. I mean, that's at the heart of their deepest fear. It always comes back to safety, either physical safety or psychological safety. And so when they see you not acting normally, meaning you're in the bed, you can't get out of bed, you can't, you know, make their lunch or whatever you typically do, that leads to a heightened level of anxiety, depression, or worry for our kiddos. And I actually believe COVID has caused an increase in this in our kids in particular, because what COVID has told our kids is that even healthy people who get COVID could die, right? So even if, you know, COVID deaths are not something we necessarily talk about anymore, our kids have lived that fear, even if it's not something close to them. They've heard it on the news, they've seen it, they've talked to their friends about it. So I think COVID has kind of made this situation worse. So if you're, you know, sick, or if you ever get sick, or if anybody else in your family gets sick, grandma or grandpa gets sick, and your kid has a spike in worry, don't necessarily just shut down their worry because uh it may be very real to them. So, what do we do about it, right? I think that's what we all want to know. What do we do about it? So the first thing uh that I try to do for parents, especially, is to try to do like say this instead of this, right? I think most of us are just doing our best to try to help our kids feel better, help our kids understand the world better. And so often we might say things without necessarily knowing how our child's brain works, how uh they are experiencing the world. And so I try to share that expertise here. So instead of saying don't worry, instead say, I can see this is bothering you. Tell me what your brain is saying to you. Your goal here, and I've talked about this before, your goal here is instead of shutting down the worry by saying don't worry, when you say don't worry to a kid who's already worried, it feels very ridiculous, frankly, because they're sort of in their head saying, It's too late, I'm already worried, right? So instead of saying don't worry, which is an effort to shut down their worry, I want you to draw it out. Try to get them to talk about it. What does their brain tell them? What is their mind saying to them that that makes them feel afraid? What makes them feel worried? I would even use those words. I can tell it's bothering you. I can tell you're worried. It seems like you're really scared. Tell me what you're scared about, right? Ask them more questions and just be present in listening. Try not to fix it, just try to hear until they can draw it all out. But don't tell them that they're overreacting or being too sensitive or dramatic. Instead say, this seems like it feels really big. Because the truth is for them, it is really big. It does feel really big. So if they're experiencing really big feelings right now, even though you know, and maybe even later they will know it's out of proportion to what's actually going on in this moment, that's not the time to teach them that. So if they're feeling really big feelings, now's the time to say, this seems like it feels really big. Let's take a couple of deep breaths together to let your brain and your body catch up together. Let's take a couple of deep breaths. Taking those deep breaths slows their body down so that their mind can catch up and then we can do some teaching. If they're in the height of their emotion, we're not going to be able to do any teaching. So don't say, don't worry. Instead, say, I can see that this is bothering you. Tell me what it is, draw it out, right? Don't say they're overreacting or they're being too sensitive or traumatic. Instead, let them know that you know that it feels really big and help them calm down by taking some deep breaths. If their worry persists, right? If it continues and it consistently negatively impacts their relationships at school or their progress at school, then that may be time to reach out to a therapist or maybe even increase time with their person, right? I find that most kids have a person. Maybe it's grandma, maybe it's an aunt, maybe it's a best friend. See if they can spend a little more time with that trusted friend or person, even just kind of redirecting them. So worry as it stews feels like it grows, right? So if we try to keep it from stewing by redirecting them or having them spend more time with someone that they care about, you may find that you can get them to be back down to a lower level of worry, uh, just even with those things. And then again, if it persists, seeing a therapist may be an important part of that. You know, I often tell parents to think about worry or anxiety that happens along a continuum, right? And when their behavior tells us they need more support, our goal is to lower their overall level of stress or worry or anxiety, right? Because all those things can get mixed up inside of them. And so if their anxiety or stress or worry is, you know, on a scale of zero to 10, and 10 being they're the most stressed or anxious they've ever been, if they're at like an eight, then we want to try to get them back down to like a level three. And we do that through breathing and redirecting and spending time with, you know, friends or things that they enjoy. You know, what we're trying to do is get their overall level down far enough so that we can start teaching them and they can start having other experiences. Focus on breathing, relaxation, sleep. Sleep, sleep, sleep. If you have a kiddo who is worrying at night, trying to get them back onto a regular sleep schedule is going to be really important because if they're not sleeping well, it's not going to help their level of anxiety at all. So you may ask your kids or even your teens to give you a daily rating of their level of worry. Maybe it changes throughout the day and you ask them throughout the day, maybe you put it on a graph or you have them kind of write it down in a little notebook that says, you know, mom, I'm at a level seven right now. And then you can talk through what would it take? How much breathing could we do together to get you from a seven to a five, right? This gives them awareness of where they're at emotionally, but it also gives you awareness of how you can respond in various moments. And then it can also start to show some patterns of things that may be happening over the days or weeks if your child is having consistent struggles. So there's a few uh ideas, thoughts about worry. Again, if you have any thoughts or feedback about this episode or any episode for that matter, feel free to shoot me a message. Um, Beth at MakeWordsMatterforgood.com. And thanks for listening today. You know, I was reflecting earlier this week as I was late to get this episode posted. Ah, you know what? I mean, winter break is always lovely. But then when you have kids around and you're trying to get things posted, it sometimes causes some real struggle. So sorry this is a couple days late, but know that I am always uh, you know, thinking about new ways that I can reach out and share more information. So if you have any feedback, feel free to let me know. Thanks for listening as always, and make words matter for good.
