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How to help your anxious child with crying before bedtime Night time for a child with anxiety disorder can be a difficult time. It is the time of the day when thoughts of the next day of school come to mind and a racing heart and uncontrollable fear sets in. My daughter sometimes would start crying at dinner time building up to uncontrollable crying at bedtime with intense fear about the next day. I can remember laying down with her and holding her crying myself. I have taken many trips to the psychologist and listed below are tips that have made bedtime considerably less stressful. It helps to tell your child what anxiety is. I explained that it was a tricky alarm and that we just have to learn to control our alarm. You can then continue on to talk about ways to calm down. Learning to breathe in and blowing out slowly can relax a person and make it more difficult to become anxious. Also tighten up various parts of your body and let them relax. We still do our breathing and scrunching exercises as part of our bedtime routine. Anxious children can also have very specific worries about the next day at school such as, “What if I have to go to the bathroom and I am too scared to go?” or “What if the other children are mean to me at lunch?” Making a list of the worries is a good idea and you may even find that your child has the same worries every night. To help my daughter try to take her worries away we bought worry dolls for her to put under her pillow when she sleeps and her worry dolls will remove her worries. My daughter after a while thought that her worry dolls were not working so I told her that they were very small and that they take time. This worked as she came to me weeks later saying that one of her worries was gone. I told her that her dolls helped her work though her worry and that it were not only her worry dolls but also herself that worked through her worry. I also purchased a CD for children to listen to and relax which I would play at bedtime when we were doing our breathing and scrunching exercises. While listening to the CD we would hold our worry beads and move the beads slowly back and forth or rub them. Worry beads can be wood beads on a string or glass or even plastic. Providing support at school will also help your child feel calmer at night and help them to relax and know that the next day everything will be fine and that their fears are not real or validated. Knowing how to help your child through their anxiety will help you to feel calmer and less wrapped up in their anxiety. Believe me I felt just as upset and helpless to help my daughter in the beginning as well. I always remember One step at a time – One day at a time. George-Ann Bains
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