Autism and Anxiety

What Can Parents Do To Help?

One of the things I get asked about most is anxiety in autistic children and teens.  It’s often an ongoing issue, and parents tell me they are frustrated because the rest of the world doesn’t recognise their child as anxious – and this makes things worse.  They also tell me that mental health services will sometimes refuse to see their child because they say that the anxiety is ‘just part of their autism’. 

Anxiety shows up in many ways for autistic children. Tummy aches, headaches, irritability, sleep problems and meltdowns. Sometimes it looks like disruptive behaviour and that can be hard to manage.  Not only because of the behaviour itself, but because it provokes such strong feelings in you yourself.

When anxiety looks like behaviour, things can quickly go wrong. Adults respond in a way which make things worse, because they are responding to the behaviour, and missing the emotions which are driving it.

What can you do as a parent do to help your autistic child with anxiety? That’s what I cover in this upcoming lunch time webinar. You’ll understand more about what anxiety is, how it manifests in autistic children and what you can do to help. It’s not about quick fixes, but more about how you can adjust your parenting to help your child thrive.

There are two of these webinars, one for children which is tomorrow.

And one for teens which is next week. I’d say that the teens one is suitable for those from aged around 12 upwards or younger if you want to prepare yourself – there is quite a bit about adolescent brain development.

Both these webinars are recorded if you can’t make the time or just want to watch it through more than once.

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