Winning The Fight With Themselves: Helping Your Child With Insecurity Problems

We’ve all been there, and we understand just how difficult it can be. When we are going through adolescence, we feel we are in it on our own. And nobody can help us. And the great benefit we all have as parents is that we have been there, but we know just how impenetrable we were when our parents tried to help us. When it comes to helping our children deal with issues of insecurity, in some respects, our children don’t want us to help, but at the same time, they will easily reprimand us for not supporting them. And when our children need our help, they won’t necessarily tell us right away. Adolescence is, for everyone, an insecure and anxiety-inducing time. So what can we, as parents, do to help our child when they feel anxious or insecure?

Remember Empathy

We have to know when we can step in and support our children. There will be times that they will have to fight their own battles. But we also need to realize when our children need space. As parents, our job is to reassure and not overreact to scenarios. There are so many parents out there that can become those helicopter parents. Being a helicopter parent is someone who is going to dive in at any given moment. While it comes from a good place, it’s not going to help our children to fight their battles. When it comes to insecurity, we need to take a couple of steps back to see what the main issue is. There will be times that our children are insecure over an aesthetic issue. And we may feel that this is something not worth being upset over, but this is when empathy truly comes into its own. 

We’ve got to think back about those times when we were incredibly self-conscious about that tooth or our spots. The great thing is that there are things that we can do to help solve this problem for them. If your child has an issue with one of their teeth, they can go to a dentist, and there are fantastic treatments to reduce spots. And we have the benefit of hindsight to not think so much about aesthetic issues, but when we were children, it meant the world to us, and we have to remember this.

Look At Your Own Anxieties And Insecurities Too!

Something that we can all forget as parents is how we react to our children. If our children feel self-conscious about something that we don’t deem as important and we make light of this, it could very well cause a complex or make their issues worse. We need to check ourselves and monitor our behavior around our children. But it’s also important to understand if we are giving off something untoward. 

We have to remember back to when our children were babies and that they were able to pick up on our anxieties and insecurities. This would, in turn, stress them out. But rather than having a crying baby or someone who was prone to meltdowns, now you’ve got a child who is internalizing all sorts of stresses which is not healthy in the slightest! The most important thing to remember when you are addressing issues with your children is you all think differently. You’re not able to change your child’s feelings towards a situation, but you have the benefit of being able to help them.

Giving Them The Tools To Manage Insecurity

For any child growing up, there will be times when they won’t want their parents to be involved. This could very well be because they want to be accepted by their peers, or they feel that as parents, we just “don’t understand.” And this means that we’ve got to take a step back, but if we want our children to solve their problems, we must figure out the tools that they need. It can be all too close to home. If we look at our children handling the situation and it reminds us of when we were their age, our instinct can be to protect them. But instead, it’s the ideal opportunity to look at what you think you could have benefited from when you were their age and subtly give them those tools. And remember, if your children don’t want you to help, this means you’ve got to become an adept psychologist. Think about how you can get your children to absorb certain information. This is when it’s time to get creative. 

If your children won’t listen to you, but they want help, you could very easily go for professional advice. Or on the other hand, you could turn to television. While television is something that isn’t always going to help, it’s important that when our children don’t want our support or our involvement we’ve got to find other ways to influence them to change their behavior. Finding lessons in popular culture is, in many ways, a very surreptitious way to help your children through problems. But it’s something that we can all take comfort from. A great example is something like The Simpsons. There are so many episodes that can help our children through anxiety issues that all we’ve got to do is find these episodes and put them on in the background, and something may filter through to our children.

Learning To Improve Emotional Intelligence

We can look at our children’s problems and think that they amount to nothing, but when we think back to how we were when we were their age, it was everything. And this means that if we want to help our children gain some perspective on the situation, we can help them to normalize their feelings of anxiety. It’s important that we, as parents, need to stay objective. They shouldn’t feel that what they are saying is silly or pointless, but it’s about normalizing their anxieties and making them remember and feel that everybody goes through these things. And there are cliches that we can dish out at this point such as “everybody is in the same boat,* but when we start to bring out the cliches, it falls on deaf ears. It is far better for us to help our children through these issues by encouraging their ability to empathize with others, gain perspective, and objectivity. 

At the same time, we have to remember that we can’t tell our children to be mature about it all. After all, our children haven’t developed emotional maturity like we (supposedly) have. But what we can do is help them to look at things from different points of view and to truly think about these things. When we go through problems, we can internalize them but also be selfish about it and think that nobody else has ever gone through these things. But this is the part of being a parent where you’ve got to put in the hard graft and realize that it takes time. When our children have anxieties over something like giving a presentation, they will end up giving so many different presentations throughout their education that, after a while, we can help them to learn something new each and every time. But this means that we’ve got to be the helpful and supportive parents by learning to cement the bond with our children over time.

When our children feel insecure or anxious about something, it will feel like the world is caving in, and when we try to help, our instinct is to take over. But the most important battle that our children will ever go through, in terms of insecurity, is the battle with themselves. That’s not to say we shouldn’t help our children, but we must remember the importance of developing resilience.

Speak Your Mind

*