Anxiety Around Returning to School
It’s that time of the year again, kids are returning to school and families are preparing for this transition. Every year during this time we see an increase in worries related to the first day of school, insecurities, and friendships. There are many ways that parents can support their children through this transition. Here are our biggest tips:
Talk to your children about their worries. We can all related to increased anxiety and worries related to a transition, use this knowledge to validate and understand your child’s perspective. Encourage your children to reflect on previous years and how these worries are similar or different and shift their perspective away from the possibility of the worst case scenario and towards the middle ground. Create plans with your children for how to navigate potentially challenging situations. Walk with them from class to class during orientation, ensure they know how to get where they need to be and feel comfortable navigating the halls.
Create a back to school tradition with your child. This could be a “practice day” where you and your child wake up when you would for school, you get ready, and then go out to breakfast and talk about the things you are excited about during the year, reflect on previous year, and connect before things get busy. Creating routine around a big transition can give your children a sense of stability that will help them navigating challenges.
Talk with your child’s therapist about how you can work together to best support your child. Work with their therapist like a team to let your child know they have a strong support system. Their therapist may have suggestions that help you to support them throughout the first week and the days leading up to it. Each child experiences different back to school related worries. Working together you can come up with a plan for what they need.
Ultimately, do your best to remove stressors during this time by comforting them and reminding them of all the resources they have access to, both internally and externally. Help them to identify the location of the counselors office, the deans office, any on campus student support services, as well as external resources such as therapy or ways to communicate with you about what is going on. Some families initiate a weekly check in about how the week went, what they have coming up, and how they can best support each other through this transition.
You can do this and clinicians at Through the Woods Mental Health Services are here to help!
