Learn how to differentiate between normal anxiety and an anxiety disorder in girls, and discover when professional help might be necessary. This episode covers key areas such as temperament, unsafe family and school environments, friendship challenges, typical childhood transitions, emotional overload, and how children may absorb their parents’ anxiety.
Related resources from Dr. Jordan:
Dr. Jordan’s book: Sleeping Beauties, Awakened Women: Guiding the Transformation of Adolescent Girls
Previous Dr. Jordan podcasts on similar topics:
- Why Teens Do Stupid Things
- Why Teens Don’t Want to Grow Up
- How to Help Young Adults Deal with Uncertainty About Their Future
—
Listen to the podcast here
Does My Daughter Have An Anxiety Disorder?
How Normal Childhood Behaviors Can Masquerade As Anxiety
Understanding Anxiety In Daughters
Friends, thanks so much for stopping by here to read my show and hopefully to learn something about your daughters or about girls that you work with, if you’re a teacher or a therapist or any person like that, or maybe a grandparent, grandmother, or grandfather. The topic was triggered. I want to do this because I see this question in parents’ minds so much. Does my daughter have an anxiety disorder? Is my daughter anxious? It’s hard sometimes to know. Is this a normal thing? Is this like an abnormal thing that needs to be diagnosed and medicated and all that and treated?
In this day and age, when we diagnose and medicate very quickly, I think it becomes even extra hard to know, especially since sometimes our daughters are ahead of us. They get online, they go to sites and they start to self-diagnose. I can’t tell you how many girls I’ve seen in the last few years who tell me that they’re socially awkward. They have an anxiety disorder. Are they bipolar or whatever? They saw a list of some symptoms online somewhere, on TikTok or whatever. I want to give you some information about how you can look at your daughter’s behavior.
If you’re thinking about your daughter in terms of, “I see her being anxious sometimes, is it okay? Is it normal? What does she need? Is it more than what the normal thing is? Is it abnormal? Is it something that needs to be looked at by a psychologist or a psychiatrist or something like that?” this is what you’ll learn, I hope, from this show. I think one of the first things to think about when we look at our daughters is their temperament because some normal kinds of temperaments sometimes can make us think that our kids have anxiety or an anxiety disorder.
One of our kids was slow to warm up as a little kid. I remember when my deceased mother-in-law was a wonderful grandma. When she would come to our house, sometimes she wanted the grandkids to run up immediately, hug her and give her a big kiss and she wanted to kiss them on the face. Our daughter was like, “Whoa,” when she walked in the door. I think there was this thing in our minds, like, “What’s wrong with her? Why isn’t she kissing Grandma? She loves grandma. Grandma’s so good to her.” She was a little bit slow to warm up.
The same thing may be true in social situations. Some of your kids may come and cling to your side when they’re toddlers or even when they get a little bit older. We wonder, “Are they okay?” I’ve seen parents who see kids who have a normal introverted, slow-to-warm-up temperament who think their kids may be on the spectrum because we talk about that so much as well. Sometimes, the temperament of being slow to warm up causes parents to worry, especially if you have extroverted parents.
If you have parents who are talkative and outgoing and they like to leap into social situations and they have a kid, a son or a daughter who is slow to warm up who’s shy and introverted, if you will, they have a hard time sometimes dealing with those kids or connecting with them because they’re so much different than the parent is, which makes them sometimes feel like, then therefore it’s not normal. I also think about sensitive kids. They are sensitive to their environment, sensitive to noise, lights and crowds because sometimes you’ll see anxiety in them when it comes to going some places.
If you’re going to an event where there are going to be a lot of people, they don’t want to go. Sometimes, it’s even things like school refusal because of a big school. Some of those kids don’t have a disorder. They just have a hard time with all the people and all the noise. First of all, they may need to learn how to deal with that sensitivity, but also to take things in small packages. Sometimes, it’s nice if you have a little kid who’s starting kindergarten, say a public school. Instead of just taking them on the first day and hoping they’ll be okay, you take them there a few weeks before school starts and walk around the building.
They get a sense of what’s this going to be like. This is when There is not anybody there, maybe some teachers. you have them meet their teacher, maybe one on one. Hopefully, it’s a nice, warm, nurturing teacher who can make them feel at ease, make them feel safe, nurtured and loved right away. You can do those step-wise things to get them used to an environment. Also, you can learn to notice when they’re getting overloaded sensorially.
Over time, teach them how to notice that as well, then remove themselves, take care of themselves so that they can come back, even if sometimes it’s still the same environment. Sometimes there are some kids, I see this a lot with girls, maybe in middle school and high school, where their very extrovert parents and maybe their experience was having a big group of friends in high school and their daughter only has one friend. They don’t call people on the weekends and they like being at home.
They’re like, “Why aren’t you going out with your friends?” Whereas, some of those kids are homebodies. They’re happy being home. Also, some of those kids are okay with just having one friend. For them, one good friend is enough. It may not have been enough for their mom or their dad. I’m thinking of their moms, especially in this situation, but it’s okay with them. Sometimes, we have to reconcile ourselves to it’s okay for our kids to have a different style, a different temperament when it comes to friendships and to not push them past their comfort zone when it’s not about they just need to be more comfortable.
It’s more about this, just not their style. They don’t want your social life. They want to create their own kind. Some kids also get anxious when their parents are rushing them. That’s probably every kid, but there are some kids who just have a slower life pace. They’re just more easygoing and they don’t like to rush. They don’t like to be pushed. If you have a parent who’s more intense and who tends not to be on time with things and so there is a lot of last-minute rushing, you’re probably going to get to your worst out of your kid then, because they’re going to get anxious because they don’t like to be rushed. It makes them anxious.
The kids like to have things planned out. They like to know about things in the schedule ahead of time. There are no surprises. If as long as you recognize that it’s a temperament thing and you yourself and then you teach them how to prepare themselves, then they’re not anxious. It’s only when we’re pushing them past where they’re comfortable in a way that’s not respecting them and their temperament, that’s when sometimes anxiety comes. I also see a lot of kids who sometimes are anxious because they’re very deep, very empathetic, very sensitive kids.
Sensitive by sensitive to their environments and sensitive to other people. They’re sensitive to other people’s emotions. They’re very empathetic. A lot of times those kids get overloaded and overwhelmed just because they absorb so much all day long. They might be in school all day and they’re talking to their friends and they’re the kids sometimes whose friends come to them with their problems. They’re their friend’s therapist or the “friend’s mom.” Those are kids who have lots of emotions of their own. Plus, they’re absorbing all the emotions around them. At some point, they get overloaded. It becomes too much.
Empathy is a gift, but for some kids, absorbing everyone’s emotions can lead to overload and anxiety. Share on XWhen they’re younger, they have a hard time sifting through these emotions. “Which ones are important? Which ones can I let go of? Which ones are other people’s emotions I can let go of? Which ones are mine?” It’s hard to do that when you’re 4 or 6 or 8 sometimes. They need some more maturity and some practice in learning how to let go of all that so they don’t allow themselves to get so overwhelmed. Your daughter’s temperament is one piece of the puzzle, one piece of the pie. “Is my kid okay? These behaviors I’m seeing, some anxiety, is it normal, or is this like an anxiety disorder?” I think sometimes we overdiagnose when it’s really just a temperament thing.
Impact Of Environment On Anxiety
I would step back and look at the family environment. Is your home calm? Are people feeling connected? Is it the home where people are rushing around, people are distracted? Everybody’s on their phones a lot? Are people in tents or tents? Is there a lot of anger in the house, a lot of arguing between mom and dad or between parents and that child or are they siblings? Is it a loud house for a kid who’s not a “loud kid?”
Some of the hardest homes for kids to adjust to and not be anxious about are the ones where the home is unpredictable. They don’t know what they’re going to walk into when they come home from school. Is it going to be a calm time or is somebody going to be losing it? Is somebody going to be upset? There are a lot of parents whose lives are giving them a tough time or are struggling. They have a lot of challenges, and they often get stressed. A lot of times, they take that stress and their anger out on people around them, their wives, their husbands and their kids.
If the kid is in an environment and they’re a sensitive kid, especially when it’s loud and chaotic and there is a lot of anger and tension, those kids often end up becoming more anxious. Not because they have a disorder, but because the environment around them, the context that they’re in, it’s not serving them. I had a girl who I saw not too long ago who had an older brother who was causing the family a lot of problems. He was having major fits, outbursts and fighting with his parents. They found some pot in his room and some other drugs.
They called the police a couple of times because he was so out of control. This girl did not like being around all that anger. Her amygdala, her fear center in her brain, the emotional center in her brain got sensitized to all of that. Anytime she was in her regular life, whether at school or anywhere, if she started hearing voices being raised or people yelling, even if it was not about her or at her, it triggered her.
A lot of the old feelings from her home life, being around that and being scared and worried, would come up. It caused this kid to look anxious sometimes because she was because she had this life experience that said that it was not safe right now. Even if it was, it felt like it wasn’t because the feelings were similar to what had happened at home. I hope that made sense. Some of those kids get diagnosed. One of the girls who had that story would hide in her room and her parents thought she was depressed. She wasn’t depressed.
She was just trying to take care of herself in this home environment, which was unsafe, loud, angry, tense and intense. She was trying to take care of herself. Knowing what’s going on in the home, oftentimes will give you some window into is this normal or is it not, normal anxiety or just situational because of the environment that the child is in. I think that when COVID hit several years ago, a lot of homes became anxious because we didn’t know what was going to happen.
Kids weren’t going to school. People were getting sick, people were in the hospitals, it was a 24/7 news cycle. A lot of times, the home life became intense, tense and anxious. When kids are around anxious parents, they usually become more anxious. They play off their parents’ emotions. I’d be aware of what’s going on in your home. Is that causing my daughter to show some signs of being anxious? I also would look at the school environment.
How School Environment Affects Anxiety
A house of fit between your daughter and their teacher. Is it a good fit? If it is, then kids will be more than happy to go to school. They feel safe in the classroom because they have a connection with the teacher. If it’s not a good fit, if you have a daughter who’s more quiet and sensitive and you have a teacher who’s loud and critical and just out there, now I think sometimes that can cause anxiety in kids because it’s just not a good fit.
Before labeling anxiety, check the school environment. Is it a good fit for your child’s temperament? Share on XIn the early grades, I think it’s so important to find a good fit with your kids. If they’re in seventh grade or sixth grade or beyond, I think they need to learn how to be with different kinds of teachers, but not when they’re little kids. I think sometimes they get a bad start to their school experience because it’s not a good fit. Sometimes, the teacher isn’t yelling at them, but they’re yelling at the other kids. That even will cause some girls to come home anxious because they’re worried about either them being yelled at, they’re worried about making mistakes, or they worry about their friends because sometimes their friends are being yelled at.
I had one little girl who was in second grade who was really intimidated by her teacher. She was very tall and had a very loud voice, and she barked a lot. Just her normal tone of voice was almost like barking. She came to see me because she was having school refusal and she wouldn’t tell anybody why. The reason that I heard from her in my office was that she was scared of the teacher. I encouraged her and her parents to sit down and talk with the teacher. I’m talking about the little girl to sits one-on-one or with the parents in the background and just says, “Tell the teacher how she feels and what she needs from her.”
I’ve done that over the years, having kids advocate for themselves and let teachers know what they want. It’s amazing how they relax then. I’ve never had a teacher who didn’t listen and take it seriously. Sometimes, that helps kids to learn how to manage their environment and to make themselves feel safer. Some schools are a bad fit because it’s just a really big school. Some kids blend right into a big school and some kids do better in a smaller environment and vice versa.
Sometimes it may not be just a big school. It’s a large class size. There is a huge difference between being a class with fifteen first graders or eighteen first graders versus 30 first graders. Especially in this day and age when we’re cutting back on the number and the length of recess, things of that sort and gym class. I think sometimes that can cause kids to feel anxious because, just at the size of the class, not getting enough one-on-one attention. The loudness and the bodies in the building are sometimes triggers for some kids.
In this day and age, other things in the school environment might make kids feel anxious. Things like fire drills, things like intruder drills, lockdown drills, they hear all this stuff on the news about school shootings. There is all this talk about teachers walking around. Are they going to be wearing guns? I know a lot of kids, we’ve talked about this on some of my weekends and some of my summer camps, girls getting really scared and worried about all that. They wish they didn’t have to do all that because it’s terrifying to them.
It’s terrifying to all of us. I think that can cause the school environment to feel unsafe, which may cause kids to feel a bit anxious about going to school. I told you this before in a previous episode. At one of my middle school weekend retreats last year, the girls started talking about how boys were touching them, groping them in the hallways of school and how they felt assaulted. They didn’t know what to do about it, because if they said something to the boy, then everybody made fun of them.
If they screamed, then everybody made fun of them. If they did nothing, they got more. If they went and told the teacher or the administration, almost always nothing happened to the boy. They felt like they were stuck and they were talking and throwing a lot of tears about how hard it was for them to deal with that.
I remember one girl one time just in with a very deep, sensitive, mature, empathetic girl talking. I remember her saying, “We’re in seventh grade. We shouldn’t need to be dealing with this in seventh grade.” That would cause a lot of kids to feel anxious if there is a lot of that going on in the hallways, especially if the school is not taking it seriously and not doing anything about it.
Navigating Friendship And Social Pressures
That may be why some kids refuse to go to school and they get diagnosed with an anxiety disorder, which really about it’s an unsafe school environment. I also would be interested in the context of friendships in that school. I’d be interested in the family environment. I’d be interested in the general school environment. I would also be interested in the friendship context. Some classes in every school are very friendly and very inclusive.
Not much goes on to just people get along, the parents get along. There are other classes in the same building where it’s not that way. It’s a very cliquey class. It’s a climate class with a lot of older kids, our younger kids who have older siblings and our kids with a very strong, independent-minded personality. In those kinds of environments, sometimes there is more drama. There is more conflict. There is more mean girl stuff. Queen bees show up and they start to rule the class. I would want to know, in general, what your daughter’s class is like in terms of friendships.
Is there a lot of drama going on in that class? Is there a lot of rumors that are going around? Is there a lot of gossip that goes around? Has your daughter been bullied? Has she been teased? Has she been made fun of? Has she been excluded? Does she have a good friend? Does she have a group and then the group started leaving her out and now she’s on her own? I’ve talked to so many really nice, cool girls who sit alone at lunch because of being left out by a group. They may have lost their best friend because they stood up to her and then she started spreading rumors about this other girl to everybody else. She lost not just that friend, but she lost the whole group.
Then she has nobody to sit with at lunch. It’s not surprising she might not want to go to school some days. She might be anxious when she walks into the building. I see a lot of girls also who have had past experiences where they were left out or they were bullied, they were assaulted, they were any of those kinds of things. What they learned is, “I can’t trust my peers. I don’t trust people. I told my secret to my thought was my best friend. She betrayed my trust. She spread the things I said to other people. I started being made fun of. I was shunned. It’s hard for me to trust people now. I had a best friend and then I lost her and the group because they started spreading gossip and rumors about me.”
A lot of those kids become very cautious. Some of the girls walk down the hallways at school with the resting B face because they say, “I don’t want people to try and get in my space because I don’t trust them. I’ve been hurt too many times.” That resting face, if you will, is a signal flag that says, “Back off. I’m not interested in having friends. Just stay away.” For most girls, it works to keep people away. It also doesn’t work because they don’t really want everybody to stay away. They want a good friend. They want a friend group.
It works in one sense, but in another sense, it’s not working. I would want to know that. I would want to know how your daughter feels when she walks in the door of school. Does she feel comfortable? Does she feel safe? Does she have somebody that she can feel comfortable going up to and hanging out with in her locker, sitting with at lunch, and all that? If she doesn’t have that, she’s going to be anxious a lot. Not because she has an anxiety disorder but because the context at school is unsafe. That’s safe for her to be vulnerable. It’s not safe for her to share with people.
She may have some people she attracts to her to be friends, but they’re not really deep friends or real friends because they don’t really know her because she’s not willing to show herself because she’s so worried about, “I’ve shown myself in the past and I got burned. Now, I’m going to be very selective about what I show.” We have girls in our camp who sometimes make an inside-outside drawing where we have them fold a piece of paper. On the front side, they show, “This is why I show people at school. This is the face I show. This is the person I showed. These are the qualities that I show.” They open up the little book, if you will and inside, they draw a picture of, “These are the things I don’t like to show people. I don’t feel comfortable or safe showing people.”
A lot of it is their emotions and maybe things about themselves, things about their family, but they’re so worried about being judged or criticized or being spread around as a rumor or gossip that they don’t often show those things. People only get to become friends with their avatar, if you will. “This version of myself I show people. Sometimes, where I show people is where I think they want me to show them because I so desperately want to fit in. I’ll change myself and show them where I think you want me to show you.”
That carries with it a lot of anxiety because, “What if I wore the wrong outfit today? What if I talk to the “wrong person?” What if I say something stupid or awkward?” There is a lot of anxiety in trying to keep up. How am I going to make friends? How am I going to have a sense of belonging? That’s not a disorder. That’s a normal reaction to the “hell hole,” which is oftentimes middle school or sometimes grade school and also high school or perhaps your workplace.
There are a lot of kids who came out of COVID, self-diagnosing themselves as being socially awkward. If I’ve heard that expression once, I’ve heard it 1,000 times. “I’m so awkward. I feel like I’m socially awkward,” because they got out of practice being with people face to face. They did feel a little uncomfortable at first going back to the classroom. I had college students say that a lot of people on campus were that way. Going to parties, people didn’t know what to say to each other. It took a while for people to warm up, and sometimes, they don’t feel like they have ever warmed up to where they were before.
Knowing that the friendship context would be helpful to know is this normal anxiety for what’s going on around here at school, or is this actually like a disorder where it’s crossed the line? I’ve also talked in the past about touch points in a previous episode. Touch points are times when in any of our lives when we’re about to go into a new state of development. We leap forward into a higher level of development. When we’re approaching those growing-up stages, those transition stages, we tend to be more emotional. We tend to have times when we’re more anxious. There is a lot of uncertainty. People tend to “fall apart” until they get through that transition and then they level off again until the next big leap in development.
There is a touch point normally around three, the terrible twos when they’re pushing for autonomy. A lot of 5-year-olds and 6-year-olds have anxiety and fears of the dark. They get a little clingy for a while. They become more aware of the fact that they’re growing up to the point where I used to see younger kids more that age, you were 4, 5, 6. I had so many kids in the past tell me, “I don’t want to grow up.” They didn’t want to grow up because they saw all these big people things and it was scary for them.
They wanted to stay small and be taken care of. Oftentimes, when parents baby them and do too much for them, there is no incentive for them to grow up. Sometimes, kids go through that stage easily because they have an older sibling and so they want to be older. There are other kids sometimes who don’t based on their temperament or because of their family situation. There is not a good. There is not a normal touch point in middle school. Big change is going on in their bodies with puberty, with their friendships, with the way they think, the way they process things.
That’s a very tempestuous touch point. You see a lot of emotional roller coaster stuff in the middle school years, up and down emotions, their brains are changing. I talked about that in a previous podcast where during puberty, the emotional centers of the brain are more in the back there, and those parts mature quicker and get way more connections. They’re very emotional, but the prefrontal cortex is supposed to be there to say, “Calm down. We’ve got this. We’ve been here before. This is not real. You can take care of this. This isn’t real. This is just you’re ruminating falsely, which is the worst case. Relax. You got this.”
Your prefrontal cortex is supposed to come in and help you to manage those emotions. In an immature brain, like a middle schooler and a high schooler, that part of the brain is slower to catch up. The emotions overwhelm them, which is one of the reasons why there is more anxiety in those ages. I did an episode and I interviewed some girls who were in high school. They were seniors who had told me in our high school group that they were afraid to grow up. Those are their exact words. The reason was that they felt like there were so many decisions they had to make and were afraid to make a mistake.
“What if I picked the wrong college? What if I picked the wrong major? What if?” Over the course of that conversation, what they came down to, what I came down to for them, what they came to, if you will, was that they felt like their parents had done too much for them, made decisions for them, hovered, rescued, fixed, fixed problems, solved problems for them, but they didn’t develop those muscles. Now, they’re going to go off in the world and be away from home, and they lack the confidence to know that they can figure things out because they haven’t been allowed to figure things out.
That created a lot of anxiety in them. A touch point in their life, going off to college, being a high school senior, when there is always some anxiety. There is always some normal anxiety and uncertainty because of big changes. You might leave home. You might join the army. You might go to a trade school. You might go off to college. Those things are new. You’re leaving behind your family, your friends, and the high school environment you’ve become accustomed to. Of course, there is going to be some uncertainty and anxiety, but we don’t talk about that enough.
We don’t normalize that enough. Kids think that they’re crazy. They think that they have an anxiety disorder, even though it’s just normal growing pains. You need to do a much better job of that. Go back and read that episode when I talk to those girls about the uncertainty of growing up. I’ve also talked to you before about how sometimes the anxiety that you see in your daughter is not an anxiety disorder. It’s a symptom of emotional overload because life has happened to them.
There have been times when they didn’t get the grade they wanted, a teacher was disrespectful, or their parents yelled at them, or they flunked a test, or they lost a friend, or their dating partner dumped them, or just whatever it might be. Life happens, emotions come up and girls don’t like to go there. They talk about losing it and, “If I cry, I look like I was a mess.” They have all these negative connotations to just showing your normal emotions. They stuff them. They get busy from them.
Even more so, they distract themselves from them with busyness and or with devices, watching YouTube videos, looking at TikTok, scrolling walls and looking at pictures on Instagram. That works really well at the moment to distract them from their feelings. When they close their phone, if they ever close their phone and they sit back, the emotions are still there and they come rushing back up and they start to compile. Over time, that pile gets bigger and bigger until, at some point, they’re ready to bust. They’re on overload. They’re overwhelmed and stressed out. Those emotions start leaking out.
It may leak out as anger, snapping at people, snapping at their parents, snapping at their siblings, snapping at their friends, or snapping at themselves with self-talk and self-criticism. It can look like having a hard time falling asleep. It can look like stomach aches, headaches and getting sick more often. It can look like feeling blah, losing their motivation, being distracted. It can look like anxiety. Sometimes that anxiety is just a symptom of, I got a lot going on, I’m not taking care of it. It’s got to go someplace and it’s leaking out as me feeling anxious or being anxious. When I see those girls in my office, we tease out that that’s really what’s going on.
Rumination And The Female Brain
When they are willing to take some time to release those emotions and lower the pile, so they’re less triggered and have more self-awareness, the anxiety lessons dissipate and or go away. It’s not a disorder. It’s a normal reaction to feeling overloaded. I think another piece of that pie is also the female brain. As I’ve talked to you before, the female brain is wired more than the male brain to ruminate, overthink, and chew on thoughts.
I’ve had so many girls tell me this line of thinking when they’re in high school, for instance, and they flunk a test. Their first thought is, “I flunked a test. This is how it’s going to affect my semester grade. If my grade goes down or if it affects my GPA. If my GPA lowers, then I’m not going to be able to get into a good college. If I can’t get into a good college, I’m not going to be able to get a good job. If I can’t get a good job,” and they go from, “I got a bad grade on one quiz or test to. I’m going to be homeless on the street, not being able to afford an apartment. I’ll be living in my parent’s basement for the rest of my life. I’m just a lonely loser.”
That is not an exaggeration, unfortunately. I’ve heard hundreds of girls tell me that exact line of thinking. That’s rumination. They always agree that they tend to ruminate on the worst case, not the best case. In that worst-case rumination, they get anxious. They, what if? What if I lose my friends? What if I can’t get into a good college? What if and that causes some of the anxiety in girls, which is really about rumination that can be taken care of. It needs some awareness and tools, but in my experience, when they use some of those tools, it’s not really a long-standing disorder. It’s just like a state of mind that they need to take control of.
Ruminating on worst-case scenarios is a common trigger for anxiety in young girls—help them break the cycle Share on XA couple more pieces of this pie about why we might overdiagnose kids with anxiety, which is really just some normal feelings. Sometimes, girls take on the feelings of their parents. With girls, I tend to see it more with girls and their moms. Not always, but more so with girls and their moms. I saw a girl who, when she was born, she had some problems with her heart. Within a week of being born, she was in the ICU, NICU, neonatal intensive care unit and she had surgery. She got surgery and started doing better and then she needed a second surgery. Her parents were told she may not survive this.
We don’t know if she was getting enough oxygen, so it may have affected her brain. She may end up having problems in school. They read their parents the riot act, which I hate. What they did for these parents was they said, “Worry about her.” Her mom picked up that ball and she’s been running with it for seventeen years. It’s like a black cloud is following her daughter. Every time there is a little glitch in her daughter’s life, it goes right back to, “Here we go. This is what they told us. This is one of those problems because of her surgeries when she was a little kid,” even when it’s not.
Her mom has what I’ve talked about in a previous episode. She is experiencing what they call the vulnerable child syndrome because of problems getting pregnant, problems during the pregnancy, problems in the perinatal period or in early childhood, because of those, oftentimes, it sets kids up to be seen differently than if they got pregnant right away and it was a good pregnancy and the kid came out and defined. When you’re a vulnerable child, parents see you differently, like that mom I talked about whose daughter had heart surgeries.
That causes a lot of anxiety in parents because they have a hard time letting go of those feelings. They don’t take the time to process those normal feelings of anxiety and so they get bigger. What is unexpressed becomes unmanageable. The girl who I was thinking of, because her mom was so anxious about everything, this girl started becoming anxious and she started doubting herself. At every step of the way, the mom worried about, is she going to be able to handle this step. She was being overprotected and smothered, which made kids more anxious.
Some of you are not looking at a video right now, but if you get to see it on YouTube, you’ll be able to see it better than what I’m going to describe. Sometimes, when girls look at their moms, they’ll see a worried look on their faces like this. When they see that, what you want them to see is, “You got this, I have full confidence in you. It might be tough, but you can handle it. You’ll figure it out.” That’s what you want your kids to see when they look at you when they’re taking a step, they’re one year of age, they go off to the first day of preschool, they go to school, they’re driving a car and when they go off to college.
You want them to look at you and see, “I have full faith in you.” If they see the other, if they see the anxiousness and the anxiety, it makes them more anxious and they have a harder time taking steps and trying new things because of that. The feelings the parents are experiencing are normal. They just need to take care of their own emotions so they don’t pass those on to their daughters. Starting when kids are little, in those early years, they all need a safe base, a safe person and at least one safe person.
If you go to a family party, then your two-year-old might be clinging to you, and want to sit in your lap because they’re looking around and there are people they don’t know very well. They get a little bit anxious, which is normal for some kids who are slower to warm. If you are calm and confident, you’ll soothe them and say, “It’s okay, I got you, you’re fine.” Most kids will slowly but surely slide down from their parents’ lap or edge away, and then they go out and explore the world a little bit. They’ll come running back a little bit later and they want to be hugged, they want you to be by you, which is okay.
You give them a little bit of nurturing, it’s okay. What did you see out there? What were you doing? Good for you and then they get some more confidence and then they go back out again. That back and forth, back and forth, that’s how kids learn how to manage their world. That’s how they develop confidence in the real world. They have a safe base that they know is there if they need it, but their parents are saying, “I want you to go out there and explore. It’s a safe world. It’s amazing. Go out there, have fun, do it, do your thing.”
If kids see parents who are that safe base, they’re not anxious going out into the world. If they see that wrinkled up, “World is not a safe place and you might get kidnapped or I don’t trust you and all that, then you’re going to create anxiety and make a heart for your kids to do the normal exploration which they all need to be healthy, teens and adults.
A couple more things. It’s also important to know that sometimes kids feel unsafe in certain contexts but not others. For instance, they may be talkative at home. They’re fine when there are family around, people they know. if you take them to a new situation, like when they join a new soccer team, club, or classroom, it might take a little while to warm up because it takes them a little while to check things out.
When I see girls who are slow to warm up, I ask them, is that a good thing or a bad thing? These are not 2-year-olds. These might be a 12-year-old or a 15-year-old even. Usually, they’ll say, “It’s not good.” I’ll say, “What do you think could be a benefit of being slow to warm up?” They start to realize that it’s good to be cautious sometimes. The hallways of middle school are typically not a safe place friendship-wise and our high school. It’s okay to check things out. It’s okay to look before you leap. A lot of those slow-to-warm-up kids are very observant. They notice things, and it’s not a bad thing to notice who seems safe, who seems mature, or who seems like a good friend.
They start noticing who seems like they’re a trustworthy person who might be a loyal friend. It’s okay to do that. Most of the kids, 99% of the kids I see who are slow to warm, they do warm. It might be slower than their parents want, but they tend to be warm, especially if they get support from their environment. I don’t want us to over-worry about those kids. I want them to normalize it. It’s okay to be that way. There may be some things they can do to get out of their comfort zones. I agree with that.
It’s not a disorder. It’s not something to be labeled, diagnosed, or medicated. They just need to make their environment safe and learn how to feel safe, even when things are uncertain. That’s something that they can learn over time. If they’re unsafe at school, there is usually a reason, because of the friendship dramas, because they lost their friend, because there are one of those times when there are rumors about them, when they’re being harassed by some mean girl. They’re being harassed by some boy.
I can’t tell you how many girls I’ve seen who have broken up with their boyfriends. He was a real jerk and did some things they didn’t like and put them in part of a group. He started spreading rumors about her. They were untrue. The whole group started to judge her and talk about her. She lost the whole group. That’s bad. What’s even worse is she’s got to see all those people every day, 7 or 8 hours a day.
When she walks into that building, it all gets triggered because it’s still going on. It hasn’t ended. As she sees those people, there has been no resolution. The same thing can be true at home. If there is a lot of fighting between parents, mom and dad are yelling at each other, it’s tense. If there are issues with a sibling who is bullying them, or if there is an issue with a sibling with their parents where that, like that kid I described earlier, where there is a lot of fighting and yelling and worry and all kinds of drama with an older or younger sibling.
It may mean that it doesn’t feel safe at home. Their amygdala has been firing at warp speed for a long time and they get sensitized. They get more easily triggered by environments where there is anger or chaos and things of that sort. If the environment hasn’t become safe, then when they’re in that environment or thinking about that environment, then anxiety comes up. What are two other quick things and then I’ll wrap it up. I also see girls who have what I call situational anxiety, which is.
I saw a girl recently who was experiencing the one-year anniversary of two of her friends who had gotten killed in a car accident. She was friends with them, and one of them had even gone to a homecoming dance that year. It was really hard on her. It was the first loss she’d experienced. A year later, when she went to school, nobody was talking about it. Nobody mentioned those two kids. She wanted to talk about it because she was feeling a lot of emotions. She was missing them.
She was trying to process it through, but everybody else had moved on. When she would try to talk about it, people looked at her like she was crazy, like it’s been a year, and you should be over that. She wasn’t yet. That made her feel anxious because there was nobody to talk to. Those feelings built up and then anxiety was one of the ways it started showing. Sometimes, some situations happen, like that girl who had been sexually harassed by the boy where the situation was she had to see him at school every day or see him walking around with his new girlfriend.
Everywhere else, she may be okay, but not in those specific situations. That’s when anxiety comes flooding up. I had a girl who I saw years ago who had pretty much raised herself because both of her parents were drug addicts. Her dad had been in jail several times and she used to be afraid when she was a kid. She had some anxiety because she didn’t know if anybody was going to be there to really look after her because they weren’t.
She had to take care of herself a lot. She had to make herself dinner. She had to do her own homework. She had to take care of herself. She had to take care of her own emotions as best she could because her parents were checked out. She lacked that safe base I talked about earlier. When you lack a safe base, it makes people a little bit more anxious and disconnected. I remember seeing some videos and some research when I was in my fellowship training in Boston years ago, where they would have a mom come in and sit down in front of a two-month-old. The mom had been normal emotionally, in other words, with it and attentive and nurturing.
When she sat down, the baby would smile and then mom would smile back and the baby would smile back and they would have this nice, beautiful, rhythmic back-and-forth interaction, beautiful. That’s the template for all future relationships, parent with their child, getting to that nice back-and-forth rhythm. As they showed in that research, if she had been depressed and hadn’t been responding to her baby. By 2 or 3 months of age, when the mom sat down with what they called a still face, like didn’t show any emotion, the baby would smile and try and get the mom to notice, but very quickly would give up.
A baby who had a mom who had been nurturing and attentive, if the mom came in and showed a still face, a flat face, the baby would laugh and giggle and slump over and look up and laugh and giggle. She would try a whole bunch of different maneuvers to say, “They’re usually here for me. What’s going on? Let me get, pull out my bag of tricks.” Kids who had been with a depressed mom just for 2 or 3 months would give up quickly and act angry and anxious. They already had lost faith that somebody was going to be there for me. Now imagine that, like the girl I’m talking about, who’s now 18 years of age, 18 years of that. Lacking a safe base makes kids anxious.
I had another young woman who just graduated from college. She grew up without a dad. She had a mom who was depressed a lot. This girl took care of herself, too. She lived in a big city and she had a shop for her own groceries. She had to make her own meals. She had to take care of her mom, who was depressed. She would come home, and her mom had been drinking. She would put her to bed and take care of her. She always wished she’d had a parent who had been there for her. That’s safe based. I remember she told me once that she wished she had someone in her life who would stay up late and worry about her if she was out late with her friends.
When this girl came home at any hour of the night, nobody cared. Her mom just wasn’t thinking about her. Her mom wasn’t waiting up for her. That’s enough to make a lot of kids anxious. That doesn’t necessarily mean she has a disorder. It means she’s showing some normal emotions through a situation which is really tough. When she went away to college, by the way, and she was freed up from taking care of her mom and there were attentive people around in her dorm and stuff, friends and everything, she had had some low anxiety that dissipated because she was in a safe environment with lots of connections.
She had people she could reach out to easily if she needed something. If your daughter is showing you some symptoms of having some anxiety, I would zoom out and I would do some searching. I would, first of all, normalize their feelings, because too often we don’t do that. A lot of times, kids are anxious for appropriate reasons, like those friendship issues I talked about, such as parents yelling at their siblings or the uncertainty of starting a new school. Some normal feelings happen in life because of situations and it’s okay to have those feelings as long as you are aware of them and have the ability to normalize them and then find a way to express them in a healthy way.
It’s good to know what’s triggering our daughter’s anxiety. If it’s emotional overload, then they can learn some tools for expressing their emotions so they don’t build up if it’s about an unsafe environment at school. Sometimes, schools can work with kids, help them resolve conflicts, to do some work around building a safer school classroom community. My wife and I have a program called Strong Girls, Strong World, where we go into classrooms and work with classrooms of girls. We just went to one this morning, sixth-grade girls.
We started working with them in the second semester because they were just all over each other and just not getting along. It was a really cliquey, tough class. I think we saw them three times last semester. We’re going to work with them several times this semester, this year. They need help sometimes. They need skills. Some of those skills we learned by being out in the street, unsupervised and we learned how to handle ourselves with friends, with peers. We learned to solve our own problems and we learned to pick teams and we learned to umpire ourselves and rough ourselves and all that. A lot of our kids are missing that.
There is so much supervised time these days. They’re not developing some of those skills like we were able to. Even with those skills, they could sometimes use some help. If things are to the point where it’s causing a lot of anxiety in kids in a classroom, on a team, whatever. Normalizing the feelings, helping kids understand where they’re coming from, talking to them about their brains and normalizing that part. Teaching them to learn to recognize things that might be triggering them. Teaching them normal coping skills to handle the normal ups and downs of growing up. Of course, there is uncertainty for a high school senior before they go off to school.
Of course, it’s normal. There are things you can learn to do to take care of yourself. They need to learn those things all along the way. We need to teach girls to know themselves. If they’re slow to warm, become aware of that. It’s okay. Also, let them know there are certain situations where you might want to need to get out of your comfort zone or it will cost you. They can learn to become aware and learn how to push themselves to get out of their comfort zones. If they get overloaded with emotions, noise, sounds and crowds, they can learn how to recognize that, remove themselves and take care of themselves.
Coping Tools For Anxiety
They can learn to have quiet time to express their emotions by journaling and stories and writing songs, poetry and drawings. I have a wall in my office. More and more girls are drawing me and painting me pictures of how they express their emotions. Amazing. All of them are different. Just expressions of this is how I feel. I’m just trying to release it, channel it into something different than screaming at somebody or having anxiety. It’s awareness, it’s about tools to express, it’s about normalization. We need to have a lot of understanding from the adults around us so that we don’t jump to a diagnosis or a label or a medication. I can’t tell you how many kids I’ve seen who started with some anxiety and it was either situational or something going on.
They went in to see a doctor, a pediatrician, or maybe a psychiatrist. Within literally a ten-minute visit, they came out with the script. I don’t like that. That’s not the way we’re supposed to take care of those kinds of things. We’re supposed to do some counseling first, help girls get to the root of it and work on some skills. If it gets to the point where they can’t manage, then they might need some medication for a while. We need to understand the pieces first and the toolbox-building stuff first. I’ll put a couple of links in the show notes.
The one about, I interviewed those high school seniors about Why They Don’t Want to Grow Up. I did an episode about How to Help Young Adults Learn to Deal With Uncertainty About Their Future. They’d want to read about Why Teens Do Stupid Things. They talk about their brains during puberty. Also, I wrote a book several years ago called Sleeping Beauties Awaken Women, Guiding the Transformation of Adolescent Girls. I talked a lot about emotions in girls during the adolescent years. I normalized them. I also talk a lot about tools.
That’s a good book for you if you’re interested in the topic of why my daughter had all these emotions in her middle school and high school years. I don’t know if my daughter has an anxiety disorder. Is it normal? I think that book would be a longer form way to get some information about all that. I hope this helps you to zoom out and get a sense of what’s going on. Why is it going on? Is this normal? If it’s normal because of all the reasons that I’ve been talking about, then all they need is some tools.
Final Thoughts On Normalizing Anxiety
They need some self-awareness. They need some support. They need some tools to manage what are often, almost always in my experience, normal emotions that occur with growing up kinds of things. Check out the website at www.DrTimJordan.com. You’ll see a page that says Resources or Products or something. That’s where you’ll find the six books I’ve written, but the one about Sleeping Beauties Awaken Women, Guiding the Transformation of Adolescent Girls.
That book will be in there as well if you’re interested. Pass this on, pass this show on to anybody you think might find it useful. See if you have friends who have a daughter who might be in either entering, middle school or high school. For some of you who have girls who have the interest, have them read this show with you. Help her identify, “Do any of these things resonate with you the times that you get anxious, saying this makes sense to you? What can we do about it? Even more appropriately, what can you do about it? How can I support you?
I will, as always, be back here with a brand new topic, a brand new episode. If you have questions, you also can contact me. If you have ideas for new topics for the show, email me through my wife’s email, Anne@DrTimJordan.com. I’m always interested in your feedback. Also, do you have any suggestions about future topics? I’ll be back here in a week. Best of luck and I hope this has been helpful.
Important Links
- Why They Don’t Want to Grow Up – Past Episode
- How to Help Young Adults Learn to Deal With Uncertainty About Their Future – Past Episode
- Why Teens Do Stupid Things – Past Episode
- Strong Girls, Strong World
- Sleeping Beauties Awaken Women, Guiding the Transformation of Adolescent Girls
- Anne@DrTimJordan.com