Helping Your Child With Performance Anxiety
By Jaclyn Long and Saumya Patel
Remember the first time you felt pressure or anxiety from a high-pressure situation? It could have been speaking in a school play, taking a big test, or giving a speech at your birthday party. Recall the emotions and sensations that were running through your body when countless eyes were on you.
Performance anxiety can be overwhelming and unnerving but it is a natural part of life! As a parent, you have the power to help your child navigate through this in a playful yet effective manner.
We would love to help you learn some fun and helpful strategies to ease your child’s performance anxiety by transforming the pressure they’re experiencing into an opportunity for laughter, connection, growth and resilience.
Step 1: Embrace imperfection through playful activity!
1. Do it Wrong on Purpose
Encourage your child to intentionally mess up. Yes! That’s right. Help them make mistakes…on purpose. While many parents have the approach of practice makes perfect, this can actually intensify anxiety for the child. What children really need help with is relaxing around their mistakes. If your child is in a play and is practicing their lines, make them write all the ways they can say their line wrong in a jar on slips of paper. For instance, they could write they talked too fast, too slow, or messed up a certain word. Then, make your child pick a slip from the jar and say their line as what is written on the slip. Gaining exposure to being wrong and making goofy mistakes makes it so that the thing they were scared about doesn't feel as scary anymore.
2. Play with Mistakes: Make mistake-making fun.
Call it “WWW” instead of “RRR”. Let your child know that RRR stands for Really-Really-Right. But that’s boring. Let them know that this new game is WWW which stands for Wild-Wacky-Weird. Ask your child to tell you something to draw with your eyes closed, and be sure to make lots of silly mistakes as you draw with your eyes closed. When you open your eyes, celebrate in a playful way all of the funny and silly mistakes you’ve made while drawing with closed eyes. Make sure not to focus on what you got right or did well - that will be tempting, but it’s not at all helpful here. Instead, focus on the playful mistakes and celebrate them. Then switch! Invite your children to close their eyes and have them draw something with their eyes closed. Be careful - they will most likely try to peek so they can get things RRR. Just remind them that RRR is boring, and what makes this fun are the WWW things. When they open their eyes, be sure to celebrate what was “Wild, Wacky, and Weird". Remember: Resist the urge to celebrate what was “Really Really Right” and instead, focus on what was “Wild Wacky and Weird.”
3. Make Perfectionism Silly
Turn the “Perfectionism-Procrastination-Paralysis” (PPP) cycle into a game. Play the “Really, Really Right” game where everything is exaggeratedly perfect to the point of absurdity, and then laugh at the impossibility of getting everything to be the “P” word! (BTW - the “P” word is actually off limits in Jaclyn’s house!)
4. WWW Practice & HW Challenges
Before a spelling test, have your child spell the first five words in the most ridiculous way they can think of. Doing homework? Let them answer the first question in a playful, WWW style. Sitting down to practice an instrument? You can ask if you can try it out, and do it in your most outrageously wrong way possible. These activities lighten the tension, helping them break free from perfectionism and procrastination, and empowering them to give a go.
By normalizing messing up, you are helping your child understand experientially - not logically - that mistakes are a part of learning and they can be wholeheartedly welcomed and embraced.
Step 2: Externalize the anxiety.
1. Sore Loser:
Patty Wipfler from Hand in Hand Parenting encourages parents to lose on purpose when playing games with children. She calls it “Playlistening”. Your role is to be goofy and incompetent at losing. Your job is to NOT handle it well, and instead act like a VERY sore loser. Be overly dramatic, and expressive, use your body to express your disappointment, put yourself down, say how much this is the end of the world, and so on.
2. Viewing Anxiety at a Distance
By acting as a sore loser, you are externalizing your child’s anxiety so they can see it at a distance and have a new perspective on their own, internal “Sore Loser” part.
3. Reversing the Roles:
When witnessing your dramatic tantrum, your child will revert to being the teacher. They will harness the role of coaching you and they will begin to say things to help you feel better…essentially working with their own “sore loser” part. If they don’t become the teacher naturally, you can ask them for help by saying something like, “Oh man! I REALLY wanna play the game with you, but I just don’t think I can handle LOSING AGAIN!! It’s the WORST THING IN THE WORLD to LOSE!! What can I tell myself - so maybe I can give it another try?”
By externalizing the anxiety, you are helping your child view anxiety as an emotion that is okay to experience. You are showing them that it is possible to “work with” anxiety. If you embody their anxiety, they can “unblend” from it, form a relationship with it, and even befriend it. In this fun and playful way, they will learn how to develop a more compassionate relationship with their emotional lives, leading to improved resilience and grit.
Step 3: Setting Limits
1. Don’t Fix
As parents, it is natural to want to “fix” your child’s anxiety. Unfortunately, fixing only provides a short term gain for a long term challenge. Help your children find the confidence to tackle their challenges independently by saying, “I know this is hard, and I know you can do this.”
2. Show Them Their Big Feelings Don’t Scare You
When you can set a loving limit and listen to your child’s big, unpleasant feelings, you empower your child by giving them the message that their anxiety doesn’t scare you. You are letting them know that these are simply big feelings that move through. Over time, they will learn that big feelings are not something to be scared of, but something they can experience with increasing ease, like a rain shower that washes over them and clears out the smog along the way.
3. Anxiety and Anger
Anxiety and anger are closely related to each other. When our children get anxious, it can activate our fight or flight system. If we try to “stop” or “fight off” our child’s anxiety, we can start to feel very powerless. And powerlessness can activate a deep sense of rage within us as parents. It is therefore vital to turn towards and work with any parts of you inside that want to stop your child from feeling anxious. Once you connect with your own, internal system in a compassionate way, it will be easier to respond to your child’s anxiety in a more connected manner. Instead of pushing your child to “practice practice practice” or to just get over their anxiety, it will be easier and easier to respond with a calm, gentle, and patient presence over time. This way your children will know that they will have your warm, steady and loving presence while they work through these intense emotions. By responding in a softer, more connected manner, you are modeling to them that it is possible to respond calmly to unpleasant emotions, in turn making it less likely for them to act out on their anxiety and anger. This is the heart of co-regulation. It all starts with you, the parent, being willing to look within and be with any parts of you inside that are calling for your attention as you listen to your children’s big feelings.
As Stanford Professor Savas Dimopoulos said, “Jumping from failure to failure with undiminished enthusiasm is the big secret to success.” By creating an environment where your child can laugh at their mistakes, embrace the messiness of learning, and understand that big feelings are not only tolerable but are welcome, you are providing them with the confidence and resilience they will need to tackle life’s challenges instead of habitually running away from them.
And guess what? You don’t have to do any of this Really Really Right. Make it easy on yourself and do it a little Wild Wacky & Weird! You got this. We're arm in arm with you. You don't have to do this parenting thing all alone.
Want more? Enjoy this video of Jaclyn Long, Director of Mindful Child & Family Therapy, as she shares some of the tips outlined above.