Don't Ask Anxious Kids What's Making Them Anxious

Distract them instead

Let’s say you’re teaching 4th Grade math. Let’s say you have a deeply anxious student. Let’s say her name is Susan.

You’re trying to teach Susan fractions. When you ask “which is greater, 1/2 or 1/4?”, a question she definitely could answer, she puts her head down on the table. Later, she won’t try any problems on her own. When you approach, she says she doesn’t understand fractions. She can’t do them. They’re too hard.

When you met with Susan’s 3rd Grade teachers at the start of the year, they told you that she cried constantly in 3rd Grade. You got a form at the start of the year saying she’d been diagnosed with an anxiety disorder. Well, you’re seeing it.

My imperfect, practitioner’s understanding of anxiety is it’s a negative fixation on the future, the flipside of being able to focus intently on some task. It’s when any fraction makes me think obsessively about how I don’t get fractions. Attempts to help me with fractions are doomed—teaching me simply prompts my negative feelings again.

OK, so how do you help Susan?

First, what I think you don’t do: don’t ask reflective questions. Maybe don’t ask any questions at all.

When I’ve asked questions to kids in Susan’s situation, I’ve often ended up escalating the anxious fixation. Even when I’ve approached everything mega-patiently! The script goes like this:

ME: What have you tried so far?

SUSAN: It doesn’t make sense to me.

ME: What doesn’t make sense?

SUSAN: The whole thing! (Sobs.)

While I speak from experience, it’s consistent with the nature of anxiety. These rhetorical moves just direct the student’s attention right back to the thing they are anxious about. Why would that help?

(Don’t just take my word for it. The Child-Mind Institute advises, “Don’t ask leading questions.”)

The only way forward is to productively distract the student from their anxious feelings. One of my favorite ways to do this is to give away an answer to a problem, only asking a question after a kid is noticing and thinking about something I’ve provided.

It can go like this:

SUSAN: I can’t do this. I don’t know what 1/2 means. What does it mean to find fractions equal to it?

ME: 2/4 is equal to 1/2. So is 3/6. Can you find another one?

SUSAN: No.

ME: OK, 4/8 is another. Can you find another one?

SUSAN: No.

ME: 5/10 is another. Can you find another?

And so on, getting playful about it, until Susan says she can find another.

There’s a version of this that I’ve used to help my own biological children with their writing homework. There is a kind of anxiety around writing that doom-loops around the vaguaries of the assignment. “How can I write about what I did this weekend—there are hundreds of things I did this weekend!” Go ahead, try to ask a reflective question to that kid. See if it helps.

I’ve had more success at home with this: “You had fun at the park. You enjoyed breakfast. You had a playdate. You can write about those three things.” And maybe the kid rejects those ideas, but at least we’re talking about the task itself.

The general principle is: distract kids from anxious feelings with things they can do. Break the doom loop with productive thoughts. Surprise them with success. You can’t attack anxiety directly; you’ve got to come at it from a slant. Otherwise, you’re just fueling the fire. That’s what I try to do.

Admittedly, there is a part of me that feels as if this is somehow cheating, like I’m avoiding the problem. “This is just distraction—how does that fix the child’s problem?”

But I think that’s actually the point—you don’t fix anxious feelings. You can’t address some root cause and forever be done with it. You have to be the source of distraction for kids like Susan. With time (and likely the help of a therapist, a different sort of teacher) a person can learn to be their own source of distraction, to internalize the work that teachers and parents can do for them.

And what’s true about anxiety is true about motivation, excitement, and so many other desirable habits and self-controls. Arguments about intrinsic or extrinsic motivation are blown way out of proportion. Extrinsic motivation can give kids a template for what intrinsic motivation looks like. We internalize the voices that we trust to guide us. Until kids are at that point, adults need to help.