A way back to the room

The activity

A short noticing game, and for younger children a slow breath traced with a finger. Practise them together on calm days, so your child already knows them on a hard one.

What it is for. In our experience, an anxious child is helped more by something they can do themselves than by reassurance. If they learn this when nothing is wrong, they will already know it on a harder day.

• The first step. Choose a calm day and tell your child what it is: “This is something people do when a worry gets loud. Let’s try it now, while nothing’s wrong.”

Safety. After something frightening, let your child choose their senses, and do not ask them to close their eyes.

When to get help. This is practice, not a treatment. Talk to your GP about recurring panic, worry that stops your child going to school, sleeping or eating, frightening intrusive thoughts, or several weeks of waking in fear. If your child has hurt themselves, or talks about not wanting to be alive, stay calm, thank them if they have told you, don’t promise to keep it secret, and act that day: help them ask the surgery for an urgent appointment, and if it is closed, use the routes under “If you need help right now”, at the foot of every page. If your child tells you that someone is hurting them, stay calm, thank them for telling you, don’t promise to keep it secret, and act that day, using those routes; if the person hurting your child lives in your home or your child’s other home, go straight to children’s social care or the police. If your child is badly hurt, or may have taken too much of a medicine, get medical help straight away, even if they seem well.

The other five steps, and your part in it, are in the library.

The sheet that goes with it comes with a subscription: A way back to the room.

It goes with

• When Reassurance Stops Working. For parents whose child is anxious and can’t be talked out of it, however often the adults around them try.
• Anxiety, by Age. For parents of a child whose worry has started to make decisions for them, with what helps at each age and when to ask for help.

The first chapter you open here is free to read in full.

Free on this subject

• Anxiety. What to do first, what helps, and who else can help. Free to read and to print.
• Emotional regulation. What to do first, what helps, and who else can help. Free to read and to print.