What if the thing you most want to get rid of… is actually the part trying to help?

When a child is anxious, everything in us wants to fix it. Calm it. Make it go away. I sat with a girl recently who said, “I just feel like something bad is going to happen all the time.” And her mum looked at me as if to say - please, can you stop this?

But what if anxiety isn’t the problem? What if it’s the signal?

Because anxiety is the body saying something doesn’t feel right. Something is too much. Something doesn’t make sense. And if we rush to quiet the alarm without asking why it’s going off… we miss something important.

I’m not saying we leave children in distress. Of course not. But instead of treating anxiety like the enemy, we might get curious. What is this pointing to?Pressure? Loneliness? Feeling out of control? Something they don’t yet have the words for?

Because when we act like anxiety is something that needs fixing, children start to feel like they are the problem. But when we treat it like information… something shifts. They feel less alone. Less broken. More understood. And sometimes that’s when the anxiety begins to loosen - not because we’ve solved it, but because we’ve listened.

Thank you for pausing with me. Take care.

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