A new study says therapy can help anxious parents raise calm kids. Children with a parent who suffers from anxiety have an increased risk of developing it themselves, but one year of family therapy sessions reduces the number of kids who develop it.
Lead author Golda S. Ginsburg of the University of Connecticut Health Center in West Hartford said, “In general, ‘anxiety and fear are protective’ sensations, but that might not be true for anxious kids, ‘because these children have thoughts about danger and threat when there really isn’t one.'”
Ginsburg and her coauthors studied 136 families with at least one parent with an anxiety disorder and at least one child between the ages of six and 13 who did not meet the criteria for anxiety. The parents didn’t have any other psychiatric conditions. The families were divided into two groups, 70 in the Coping and Promoting Strength Program and 66 in a comparison group. The “promoting strength” group received 8 weekly 1-hour sessions with trained therapists – the first two sessions between a therapist and parents alone and then six more sessions with any interested family members. Therapists targeted modifiable parent and child risk factors, like parental modeling of controlling behavior or overprotection. They taught parents and families how to identify the signs of anxiety and how to reduce it by changing the way parents thought about stressful triggers. Ginsburg said they taught the kids how to identify scary thoughts, and how to change them.