Lessening Kids' Anxiety Now and In Their Futures with Enlightened CoParenting

Anxiety is a common childhood mental disorder. Nearly 1 in 3 children suffer from anxiety.  During the teen-age years, nearly 1 in 3 adolescents will suffer from anxiety.

Anxiety makes normal things and seemingly regular days hard for children. 

When being coparented, especially in the beginning days, week-days and week-ends tend to feel abnormal, thereby making the transition to their new home situation even harder.  On top of that, children may be simultaneously undergoing other intense transitions such as a new home, beginning school, moving into a new school, or beginning puberty. The cumulative impact of multiple transitions also contributes to anxiety.

Enlightened CoParenting includes specific steps to minimize anxiety through developing a parenting plan that provides children with ease in daily living, parenting communication that models healthy conflict resolution, and emotion focused parenting which promotes emotional health and increased cognitive capacity in children.

Significant childhood anxiety through divorce and coparenting is not inevitable and in many cases can be prevented with mindfulness to the unique stresses that divorce and coparenting bring.

What is happening in a child's brain when they are experiencing anxiety.

 When humans experience challenging or frightening situations, the part of our brain that is the amygdala sends chemicals into our body to make our hearts beat faster and prepare us to protect ourselves with a freeze, fight or flight response. Simultaneously, we evaluate the situation we are in cognitively and scan memory to see try to come up with the best response to the challenge or danger. Taken together, these two events work together to get us quickly prepared using our best judgment. However, when humans, and kids, which is the topic of this post, experience anxiety often, the second action of evaluating is run over by the body's full throttle fight or flight response. 

In younger children anxiety is experienced differently than it is for older children and adults. Recent research has shown that they have a higher than average startle response normally and a lower startle response when things get challenging or scary. The researchers concluded that these findings suggest that young children have more to overcome when facing everyday challenges. These findings have inspired psychologists to want to help children increase their cognitive control in stressful situations in the hopes of minimizing their anxiety as children and maybe even later as adults.

There are exercises in enlightened coparenting that aim to do exactly that. Parents model conflict resolution skills and flexibility with the other parent and in their parenting, teaching children to find greater flexibility when things don't go exactly as anticipated.

We also teach children to utilize their working memory by helping them to keep track of time and schedules with visual aids like a calendar and prompts before home transitions are made. These include packing their bag for their other parent's home together, getting ready to leave and saying goodbye in advance of the parent exchange, having a notebook in their travel bags that includes reminders of things that are important for the following week.  These are ways to support children in further developing their working memory.

In enlightened coparenting, we deem all emotions acceptable but teach that not all behaviors are acceptable. Learning to identify their emotions and accept their emotions gives the child time and space to develop an appropriate response to tough or less than ideal situations. These processes support kids in getting better at doing hard things and minimize the go to reaction of a fear response.

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