Supporting Your Kids When They Are Dealing With Anxiety or Depression

As parents, we want nothing more than for our children to thrive emotionally. Yet, anxiety and depression are becoming increasingly common in kids today. Understanding how to recognize early signs, foster open communication, and encourage healthy habits can make a world of difference. Let’s explore simple, effective ways to guide children toward emotional well-being while knowing when to seek extra support.

Helping Children Manage Anxiety and Depression

Children’s mental health exists on a spectrum, much like physical health. Parents should watch for warning signs such as changes in sleep, eating, school performance, or withdrawal. Prevention focuses on basics: proper nutrition, adequate sleep, physical activity, strong social connections, spirituality, and mindfulness. Open conversations about emotions help children express feelings without fear. Understanding anxiety as a protective response and recognizing depression as a form of inward reflection can normalize these experiences. Thankfully, both conditions have effective, research-backed treatments. Parents are encouraged to trust their instincts and seek professional help when needed.

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Looking for more insights? Here are some commonly asked questions about childhood depression and parental influence, with helpful answers to guide and support your parenting journey.

What Can a Parent Do To Help a Child With Depression?

Parents can support a child with depression by recognizing when their child is withdrawing or struggling to face problems. They can encourage open conversations, help children reflect on their emotions, and seek professional mental health support when needed, as depression often signals a need to slow down and process unresolved challenges.

How Can Families Support a Child’s Mental Health?

Families can support a child’s mental health by focusing on the basics: balanced nutrition, adequate sleep, regular exercise, strong social connections, spirituality, and mindfulness. Encouraging children to express emotions and ensuring they have trusted adults to talk to can also strengthen emotional resilience and help prevent mental health issues.

How Does a Parent Help a Child With Anxiety?

Parents can help children with anxiety by teaching them to understand anxiety as a protective response, similar to a smoke detector that sometimes becomes oversensitive. Encouraging children to acknowledge anxiety without fear, and reassuring them that feeling anxious is normal, helps them manage their emotions and regain a sense of control.

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Full Video Transcript

There's a growing concern about children's mental health. Some professionals have gone as far as to say that we are in a crisis, that it is now in epidemic proportions. It's on the rise at alarming rates. That means for every parent, children's mental health needs to be on your radar. But I'd like to put a new paradigm in front of you to think about mental health. Often, we think about it dichotomously. Your kids are either mentally well or they are mentally ill. I don't think that's accurate. When we think about mental health, we should think about it much in the same way that we think about body health. It falls along a continuum. Just the same way that you can be a couch potato, or you can be an Olympic athlete. So, too, with your mental health. Constantly, we should be paying attention to how we can improve and move along the continuum from that person who's having mental health issues to somebody who's, I don't know, a meditating monk.

Recognizing When to Seek Professional Help

As a parent, we need to be aware of the flags for when your child might be needing an intervention and seeking out a mental health professional. I would say trust your Spidey senses. You do know your child best, but the kinds of things that you're looking for are: One, Is there a sudden change in their baseline functioning? Functioning for kids is often a sudden drop in their school marks. Isolation and not wanting to participate with the family. Are they having sleep issues? That can be sleeping a lot or not sleeping much at all. Changes in their eating. Again, could be that they're eating a lot or not eating at all. When you see those marked changes and they persist, those are all reasons why you should reach out to your GP or get in contact with a mental health professional. They can do an appropriate assessment.

Building a Foundation for Mental Wellness

Every parent should be thinking about prevention and about helping their kid have good mental health. And that starts with a lot of the basics. Basics like nutrition. Turns out that all those great neurotransmitters in your brain, they're actually manufactured in your gut. So, what you eat does impact your mood and your mental health. Great things like sleep. Sleep is super important in our children these days are sleeping less than any other time in history. We're down by about an hour from a decade before. Things like exercise. We need to get our kids off tech and out moving those big muscles outside to burn off some energy. One big pillar of kids’ mental health is social connections. We need to make sure that our kids are in healthy relationships with their parents, with their peers, in their school communities, with their clubs and teams. Make sure your child is being socially successful. Spirituality in whatever way you practice it. Every child needs to have something to anchor on to around their morals and their values and some guiding principles around life. What a "good" person is, whatever format that may take, it helps us get a sense of meaning and purpose in our life. And I can't say enough about mindfulness meditation. There's just too much research to refute the importance of it. There's wonderful programs for kids in schools, but there's also terrific apps that you can take up the practice with your kids as well.

Talking About Emotions and Finding Safe Outlets

One great way to ensure that your children are having good mental health is to be able to talk to them about the need for expressing our emotions. And sometimes our kids will talk to us about our emotions. But sometimes they prefer to keep it private. They don't want to share their secrets with us. And that's OK. Might be hard for us. But what's important is that they don't just solely keep it inside and bottled up or nor do they only get advice from their peers who don't always give the best advice. Help them identify somebody else that they can talk to. Is there a special aunt, a grandparent, a teacher, a school counselor? Can you give them the text number for Kids Help Phone or some support line for children's mental health where they can text anonymously or get them to speak to your GP or a counselor? The most important thing is that they talk and express their feelings.

Understanding Anxiety and Depression

We also need to educate our children about their emotions. Not to be afraid of them. Our emotions are just information that are meant to help us. Anxiety is one of the most common childhood mental illnesses. And so, I think every parent needs to take a moment to explain what anxiety is to their children. I think a wonderful way to do that is to think of it as being like a smoke detector. We've all had that experience when we went to bake some cookies and the smoke detector went off. And you're like, oh, that's a nuisance. We have to get the little tea towel and flap and say, "No, no, no, no, no. We're just baking cookies. We don't have a fire going on here." You don't want to take out the batteries, your smoke detector, it's there to keep you safe.

When your child has anxiety, it's to keep them safe too. Every single person has anxiety. It's a biological imperative that keeps us safe. It's just somehow in their bodies, the setpoint and the trigger point got a little too sensitive. And they're going to have to learn to say "Thank you. Anxiety, I understand you're showing up to keep me safe. But you know what? I'm fine."

We need to befriend our anxiety. That's the first step in order to reduce it and manage it. Depression is also a common childhood mental illness. Speaking to our kids about the roots of depression is also important. That it's OK to feel sad and to feel blue. But depression is often when we are making ourselves slow down, that there is some problem in life that we can't seem to face, and we're turning inward. It's a time of reflection. We're not allowing ourselves to move forward because we feel it's safer to sit and figure out what this dilemma in this problem is right now. Some people describe it as anger being turned inwards.

Anxiety and depression are the most common childhood mental health issues, but it also means they're the most researched and they're the ones that we have the most effective treatments for. So don't hesitate to reach out to your mental health professional.