We all know that kids are sponges. They seem to soak up all the things that we say and do, perhaps especially the things that we don’t want them to say or mimic. However, I think it’s important to remind ourselves that many times kids don’t know what particular things mean. Instead, they learn about the word from the context in which it’s used.
To flesh this idea out more, I’ll give an embarrassing example from my own personal life. When I was in the seventh grade, I remember just starting to learn some words that I knew were bad, but didn’t know exactly what they meant. One particular day in my science class, I decided to show off in front of my friends by using one of these words to describe a woman on the front of a magazine that our teacher’s aide (who was a senior) was reading. I’ll never forget the look on the aide’s face when she heard me use the disparaging term. She quickly asked me, “Do you even know what that means?” and told me to never use it again after I sheepishly acknowledged that I didn’t really know what the word meant.
In today’s technological world, our kids are bombarded with different words and ideas at a much earlier age than most of us adults. Recently I had a young teen describe to a tee the symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder based off of things that the teen had learned from TikTok.
While the internet can be an earlier educator, it’s important to help clarify with our young people the differences between the normal human experience and the “disorders” that they can learn about on TikTok. Perhaps no area of our mental health has this been more apparent in my work as a counselor than with anxiety, which is the most common issue I work with. In my experience, kids seem to be hearing this word earlier and earlier, but they often have a hard time expressing what it means and an even more difficult time understanding the difference between normal anxiety and a clinical anxiety disorder.
I think that it’s incredibly important that we normalize the experience of anxiety to our kids. Everyone experiences anxiety. It’s a normal human emotion that serves to protect us from potential danger. While it’s uncomfortable, it would be problematic if someone never felt anxious. It’s normal to feel anxious on your first day of school (or first day of work at a new job), when you have to speak in front of a group of people or before a sporting event. Have a big test tomorrow? That’s normal to be anxious about. Nervous about sitting down and talking to a therapist for the first time? Yup, that’s normal too.
Where anxiety can move away from being a normal thing and into the “disorder” category is when we find ourselves doing it too much and too intensely. You might still feel anxious even after the public speaking event because you’re worried that everyone judged you. Maybe you’re so worried about the test tomorrow, you find that it affects your studying.
All adolescents will struggle with anxiety at different times. They worry about what others are thinking about them, if their friends are mad at them or if they’ll fit in. And I think it’s important that we let our children know that it’s normal to worry about those things, that we worried about them too when we were kids, and that as impossible as it may seem, everything is going to work itself out. In doing this, we help them do the thing that I think is the most effective way to combat our anxiety. We help them voice their fears and concerns, listen to them, and let them know that no matter what the outcome (even if it goes as horribly as their anxiety is saying it will), we still love and care for them.
- Mischa McCray is a licensed professional counselor and a licensed marriage and family therapist. Send questions or topics you’d like him to discuss to mmccray@wpcgreenwood.org.
