Setting and Holding Boundaries with Anxious Kids: Parent Coaching at Compassionate Counseling St. Louis
Parent Coaching: Strategies for Effective Communication with St. Louis Anxiety Therapist, Samantha Ferrara, LCSW
We sat down with St. Louis anxiety therapist, Samantha Ferrara here at Compassionate Counseling St. Louis to talk about how she works with parents of anxious kids in St. Louis. Samantha is one of our parent coaches at Compassionate Counseling St. Louis and really loves it!
Samantha has worked with parents in several different settings around the St. Louis area and one thing always remains that same in her sessions. "I always establish that boundary at the beginning, [that] I'm here to help you and I want to walk through what the experience is [like]. And I'm never placing judgment on you.”
In Samantha’s parent coaching sessions, she makes it a priority to establish her sessions as a non-judgement place and then jump right into the specific examples of things that aren’t going well at home, like blow-ups.
Image Credit: Unsplash Mark Zamora @mmm_mark
For example, if Samantha is working with a family whose child is starting to feel big emotions and reacting to them around bedtime with melt-downs or frustration, she wants to walk through the whole experience.
This looks like exploring the parents’ emotions at the time as well as talking through what the child might be experiencing, and then talking through how everything eventually calmed down. This exercise of breaking down the moment can be so helpful to talk through problem-solving scenarios in the moment, or after the fact.
Samantha describes this process of breaking everything down like using a remote-controller, “okay, press pause, what happened now? Or what could you have done then…and then talking about what boundary can be set next time?”
Setting Boundaries for Anxious Kids: Navigating Anxiety in Parenting
Parents want their kids to feel OK and it can be really hard to set boundaries with anxious kids. Samantha knows that this can be really hard and really important, so she likes to talk about the challenges that a lot of parents of anxious kids in St. Louis face.
Often in parent coaching sessions with Samantha, she will spend time digging into how uncomfortable parents might be setting boundaries and talking about how to address those uncomfortable feelings. She acknowledges that ‘this is going to be pretty icky the first two times you do it, and then it'll get better after those two times’.
Samantha knows that breaking things down is a really important piece of the boundary setting puzzle. That’s why it’s common to spend a whole session on one specific scenario that usually will happen more than once a week and using the remote control to look at the situation, what everyone is experiencing, how to problem-solve and how to set up those boundaries that may not feel good.
What do parents ask about how anxiety impacts setting boundaries and how do you work on that in session?
Samantha shares that a lot of the parents she works with don't want to parent the way that they were parented and want to do things differently, often asking “am I doing this right”?
Image Credit: Unsplash Sai De Silva @scoutthecity
A common concern parents worry about is whether they are spending enough time with their kids, especially their anxious kids. Samantha says an example of this worry coming up might happen at the end of a long work day. A parent might worry, ‘if I say that you need to go in your room for 10 minutes, but I've been at work all day, is that contradicting the overarching theme of what parenting should be or parenting is?’
“So we talk through their own worries and anxieties and explore those kinds of cognitive distortions. Sometime we can even call them worry monsters, just like I would call them in a session with a kid, and that has been really helpful for parent(s) to realize - ‘Oh no, I'm feeling anxious, I need to take a breath, I need to take care of myself, and then put the oxygen masks on my kid’.”
How to handle the anxiety around boundary setting
Samantha wants parents to start “acknowledging your worries first”. After parent worries are acknowledged, then the focus shifts to their child.
If a child is showing up at home as angry, it might be that anxiety is behind the anger. Samantha likes to really dig in with the parents she is coaching to take a full, holistic look at what might be going on in their child's life. They might find out that at school their classroom is very explosive, so their child is keeping themselves together at school, but falling apart when they get home. Then, in the parent coaching session they might spend time talking about different ways that we can bring communication home by asking questions like “what were two good things that happened today, and what were two challenges today”?
Samantha points out that “we're not just talking about the anxiety, but we're talking about everything else in between, and it becomes easier to manage all of those things”.
How can you get parent coaching?
Our St. Louis anxiety therapists and parent coaches at Compassionate Counseling St. Louis love to connect with St. Louis parents to figure out what is already working and what could be working better. Our parent coaches do not follow a booklet or script, they get into the specifics of your unique home, family and parenting values. If you would like to get more information about working with Samantha or another one of our expert parent coaches, set up a call today.
Curious to learn more about parent coaching, anxiety and anxiety-driven anger? Reach out to us at hello@compassionatecounselingstl.com. As child anxiety experts, we love working with kids, teens, college students and parents to help manage their anxiety, stress, and anger. Compassionate Counseling St. Louis is located in Clayton, MO and works with families throughout Creve Couer, Ballwin, Town and Country, Brentwood, and Ladue. You can set up your first free consult on this very website, on our consultation page.
