Healthy Routines to Help Kids with Anxiety

How to establish great habits at home for better peace of mind for the whole family

Elizabeth Urbanowicz

Want more? This article is taken from the first part of a webinar called Helping Kids Overcome Anxiety. Watch the rest of the webinar to hear more practical ideas for helping your children find more peace of mind.

I spent the first decade of my professional career as an elementary educator at a Christian school just outside of Chicago. One of the things I noticed over that ten-year period was an increase in anxiety experienced by the students in my classroom. My first year teaching, I had one very sweet little boy who struggled with anxiety. The struggle became so great that, his parents eventually pulled him out of the classroom to homeschool him.

I noticed as each year passed that more and more students in my class struggled with anxiety. In my final few years of teaching, I taught social studies to all three sections of third grade at our school. One of the things we learned about in our economics unit was the difference between goods and services. I would ask the kids, “What are some of the services our families use each week?” Without fail, multiple children would bring up counseling as a service because many of them were in counseling for anxiety.

This is not just an anecdotal trend. It has been noted by both the CDC and the American Psychological Association. In 2003, 5.4 percent of children in the US were diagnosed with some sort of anxiety disorder. By the year 2012, just nine years later, that 5.4 percent had more than doubled to 11.6 percent. And by 2020, the number had risen to 20.5 percent. That means that one out of every five children in the United States has been medically diagnosed with an anxiety disorder. That’s not counting all the children who struggle with anxiety without being diagnosed.

What are some of the causes of all of this anxiety? What are some things we can do in the home to make sure that we're helping our children live in a healthy way that aligns with God's design for them? Those are the questions we’re going to deal with in this article.

First a caveat: I am not a medical professional or a psychologist. My perspective is that of a Christian educator. There are cases where professional medical and psychological intervention are needed. I’m not the right person to speak to that. A teacher friend of mine has four kids. When her oldest was four, she noticed that he was exhibiting a lot of anxiety and obsessive-compulsive behavior. She realized this was not normal and took her son to the pediatrician. They found out, through testing, that her son had an autoimmune disease. Every time his body caught an illness, his immune system would attack his brain, leading to high anxiety and obsessive-compulsive behavior.

The things we’re going to discuss in this article would not have remedied that situation. That was a situation where medical intervention was needed. If you’re dealing with something like that, the things in this article may be helpful, but they will not be enough on their own to really address your circumstances.

What is Anxiety?

Let’s first define our terms because people sometimes use the same words to describe different things. The definition of anxiety from the American Psychological Association is “an emotion characterized by feelings of tension, worried thoughts, and physical changes like increased blood pressure. Anxiety is not the same as fear, but the words are often used interchangeably. Anxiety is considered a future-oriented, long-acting response, broadly focused on a diffuse threat. Fear, on the other hand, is an appropriate present-oriented and short-lived response to a clearly identifiable and specific threat.” In this article, I will attempt to be very clear about the difference between problematic anxiety and appropriate fear in a specific situation.

Earlier this summer, I was visiting some friends in Europe. We went to Disneyland Paris together. I was in a shop in the park, and a 10- or 11-year-old boy ran up to the counter with tears streaming down his face. He was saying “minha mamãe” over and over (in Portuguese). He had been separated from his parents and couldn't find them. This boy was not experiencing anxiety. He was experiencing fear; a present-oriented, short-lived response to the danger of being separated from his parents. And it was easily dispelled once park security located his parents.

I saw another situation with a child at the park that day that showed anxiety. At one of the playgrounds, a little girl’s parents were trying to get her to go down the slides and to go on the swings, but she was scared because there were other people around. She just kept hugging her mom's legs and burying her face in her mom's skirt. This little girl was probably experiencing generalized anxiety. She was not in danger. She wasn't separated from her mom. There was no actual threat to cause her fear. She felt anxious even though she was completely safe at that moment.

Establish Healthy Routines at Home

This webinar is going to explore five specific things we can do to help our children with anxiety. The first is to make sure we have healthy routines in place at home.

Especially in the United States, we live life at such an unhealthy pace. It’s like we're on this giant hamster wheel. Of course we're going to have anxiety if we feel like we have to keep running faster and faster and faster. We need to ensure that we have healthy routines and practices established in our homes so that we are not forcing our children to live life at a pace that does not align with God’s design for the human body and mind.

Physical Health

The first thing we need to emphasize is the physical health of our children. Sometimes as Christians we get into the error of thinking that it’s only the spiritual or metaphysical that is important. But Scripture makes it clear that we are embodied beings. We are this intimate connection of body and soul, and we are called to pay attention to the health of both.

Sleep

Adults sometimes make the mistake of thinking that because we do fine with seven or eight hours of sleep, our kids will, too. But kids need a lot more sleep than we do as adults. According to the Cleveland Clinic, a leading pediatric clinic in the US, children ages three to five need anywhere from 10-to-13 hours of sleep per night. If a kindergartner is getting less than 10 hours of sleep per night, they're sleep deprived. Six- to twelve-year-olds need 9-to-12 hours of sleep. That means that third, fourth, and fifth graders are sleep-deprived if they’re not getting at least nine hours of sleep per night. Teenagers, too, need 8-10 hours a night. A sleep-deprived child is not going to be thinking rationally. They're going to have big emotions that are hard to control.

Nutrition

We have a major health crisis in the US. Our nutrition standards are incredibly low. We cannot use the grocery store aisle or what everybody else is doing to measure the health of our child's diet. Even with the pediatrician, a really good question to ask is if they are telling us the minimum standard or what's actually optimal? Too often, doctors will accept the minimum baseline as good enough instead pushing parents to do what's best for their child in the long term.

I’m not saying we need to be obsessed with nutrition. We don't need to make it the center of our lives. We just need to make sure our children are getting the nutrients their bodies need for healthy growth and development.

Physical Activity

Children should be spending a decent amount of time in physical activity, especially outdoors. According to the CDC, children need a minimum of 60 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity every day.

I recently read a book about Gen Z called iGen. In this book the author reported that physical activity is directly correlated to lower rates of anxiety, depression, and suicidal thoughts in children. Screen time, on the other hand, was associated with higher rates of anxiety, depression, and suicidal thoughts. It’s really important to make sure our kids are getting enough physical activity to help with their mental and emotional health.

Relational Health

Are we setting up patterns to make sure our children are developing healthy relationships within the family and even outside of the family? How much time are we spending together? Do we have a family game night once a week? Do we go outside after dinner and take a 10-minute walk or a 10-minute bike ride together? Do we actually have time to develop family relationships when it's just fun and not a lot of pressure? Also, do we understand what our children's love languages are? Do we understand how they best give and receive love? We might want to give our kids a big hug, but they might not like being touched. They might respond better to words of affirmation or quality time.

We also need to be consistent in the discipline of our children and then working with them to practice confession and repentance for the sake of their hearts and their relationships with others. Sin always tears down relationships. We need to make sure that when our children sin against us and against one another, that we're walking them through that process of confession and repentance. We also need to do the same thing ourselves when we sin against our children so they can experience healing in relationships.

Another important thing relationally is to avoid making our children the center of the home. Our children are important. They're loved. They're valuable. But every single thing in the home should not revolve around them because life is not about them. Life is about bringing glory to God. It is way too much pressure for our kids to think that life is all about them. It's feeding their sin nature. We need to make sure we're involved in serving as a family, that we're involved in the local church, so that our children understand that there's something that we're living for that's greater than us.

Also, how are we using our time and theirs? Are we over-scheduling our kids? Are all of our kids involved in a sport that takes us away from the home every night of the week? That's not healthy. We need some evenings where we're just at home. Our kids need time to have free play and to have rest.

I'm not saying that all organized sports are bad. A lot of good things can come from organized sports. But it may be more valuable for our children to spend two hours out in the backyard playing soccer with one another—and maybe with mom or dad—than it is for them to spend two hours at soccer practice or on a soccer travel team. We also need to make sure that their screen time is limited, that we're not letting them spend more than an hour a day on screens.

Being an Example

The final emphasis on healthy routines in our home is that we are dealing in a healthy way with our own anxiety. What is the example we are setting when we feel anxious?

One year, I had two different moms in my class walking through treatment for serious forms of breast cancer. They responded to their diagnoses differently, and their kids, in turn, followed their lead. As soon as one of the moms found out that she had breast cancer, she immediately rushed to the school and pulled her kids out of class. They had to talk about it immediately, and the mom was hysterical. Now I don't fault her for having that immediate response, but projecting that on her children created huge levels of fear and anxiety in them as she began treatment.

The other mom had a similar form of breast cancer, and she and her husband were honest with their children. They told them she had cancer and that she was going to go through treatments. They walked them through what things might look like, and they kept an open conversation. They asked their children questions. I'm sure internally the mom was experiencing fear and anxiety, but she did not project that on to her children. Her children knew it was a big deal. They would ask for prayer for their mom, but they weren't overwhelmed with anxiety because of how their parents had responded.

I think of this in my own life. My mom, like me, struggles with anxiety. But when I was growing up and I was anxious about things, my mom was intentional about how she phrased specific words. She never told me I was an anxious person or that I struggled with anxiety. Instead, she would mention that it seemed like I was feeling nervous and say, “Let’s talk to God about that.”

I remember that one year my teacher called me a “Nervous Nelly.” I went home and asked my mom what that meant. My mom was upset because she didn't want that to be the way that I thought about myself. Was it true that I was anxious a lot of the time? Yes, it was true, but I didn't view that as my identity because my mom was so careful with how she worded things.

I think when we have these things in place—when we're caring for our kids physically; when we're looking at sleep, nutrition, and physical activity; when we're shepherding their relational health; when we're protecting their free time; when we're wording things for our kids in helpful ways—a lot of anxiety will naturally dissipate.

Some kids, however, will continue to experience anxiety, and I think there are several more steps that will help them with that.

Want more? This article is taken from the first part of a webinar called Helping Kids Overcome Anxiety. Watch the rest of the webinar to hear more practical ideas for helping your children overcome anxiety.