The Anxiety Buster Playbook: Practical Tips to Helping Parents Navigate Anxiety with Their Children 

This presentation equips clinicians with practical strategies to guide parents in supporting children experiencing anxiety. It emphasizes the importance of helping families recognize common signs such as excessive worry, irritability, avoidance, somatic complaints, and difficulties with transitions. Clinicians are encouraged to explain how cognitive patterns (distorted thinking, anticipatory worry), behavioral responses (escape, avoidance), and environmental influences (over-accommodation, modeling anxious behaviors) maintain anxiety. The focus is on empowering parents with tools that reduce reinforcement of anxious cycles while fostering resilience. Recommended approaches include validating children’s feelings, encouraging emotional tolerance, modeling calm coping strategies, and engaging in gradual exposure or behavioral experiments. Clinicians can also coach parents to shift focus from risk avoidance to safety, resilience, and problem-solving, while reinforcing effort and celebrating progress. By sharing evidence-based tips and resources, clinicians can help parents create supportive environments that build children’s confidence, adaptability, and long-term coping skills.