Helping Your Anxious Child

Author – Dr David Lewis

Age Range – 3-16+

Key words – Worry and coping strategies

This book is aimed at parents/carers of children and young people who experience anxiety. Although the book is about feelings of anxiety in children and young people the information on anxiety would be useful for anyone of any age. It provides parents/carers with the background knowledge about anxiety responses that could support them in helping their child with most anxiety problems and possibly even their own anxieties.

The book is written by a psychologist who has divided the book into different sections. The first is general information and the second covers how to explore and understand your child’s feelings of anxiety. The third section covers some general ideas about reducing anxiety and the fourth offers advice about specific problems such as school anxiety, social anxiety and sexual anxiety. The final section provides information about how to keep anxiety at bay.

The book provides some great advice and ideas but the format and language mean that it isn’t the kind of book you can pick up in spare moments. It has quite an ‘academic’ feel in parts and is the type of book that might require some time to be set aside to read it thoroughly. It has some ideas about how to measure and score your child’s feelings of anxiety and parents might want to think about whether this might make their child feel like their feelings of anxiety are a big problem rather than a common and natural part of being human.