Coping with child's mental health

[usernamebore]

Hi all,

I wonder if anyone has any tips for how to help with excessive worry/anxiety about DC and their mental health? My son had very severe anxiety when starting secondary school in September (panic attacks, vomit, screaming in fear etc). While things are now a lot better, he remains very sensitive and easily scared (apparently, for example, he had to cover his eyes and ears in a lesson today when they watched a video of the miner's strike with police beatings and blood), and he still finds the school environment a challenge. He is allowed to call me briefly every lunchtime for 5min or so, and he often spends time with the nurse or the receptionist, though he is slowly starting to build friendships with other kids and getting involved in lunchtime clubs/events. So we are heading in the right direction (though it is slow going!), and he sees a child psychologist every week.

The problem for me is I think that couple of months when things were at the worst massively ramped up my anxiety levels, and I still find myself worrying about him all day. For example, he often finds Monday mornings tough after the weekend away from school, and I was awake at 4am this morning in a state of anxious worrying, anticipating tears and struggles and everything else. Of course, as it turned out, he was fine (even joking and laughing) and, while he did grip my hand very tightly just before I dropped him off at school, all those hours of my worry were entirely useless. No matter how often he is fine, or he faces a challenge and deals with it, I just feel constantly in a state of high alert and anxious over-protectiveness, which is not good for either of us. I just feel constantly scared we are going to go back to where we were in September, or that he is going to have brutal mental health challenges for the rest of his life. In many ways I am sure what I am experiencing is just a more extreme version of the usual worries parents have when they have to start letting their kid face the hardships and struggles of the world, but it is exhausting and I feel I am stuck in a bad habit spiral of over-worry.

Any advice/tips on how to relax and accept he is going to have hard times/ups and downs, and it is all ok?

He will be more confident in school and life, generally, if you are bright and breezy about life and school.
However hard it is to hide your anxieties be enthusiastic for the day whether a Sunday or a weekday....if he has a wobble talk it through, be sympathetic, then chalk it up to a not great day, but tomorrow may be great, new friends, new clubs etc. Say we all have rubbish days sometimes but things never stay the same.
Children respond to what they see from parents, so model kind, calm but positive responses to difficult days.
Ensure school know he is sensitive to violence and can be very upset easily so they can check on him.

Many children go through mental health challenges at some point but resilience is built by keeping going with the confidence things will improve. Same for parents we all have to learn to pick ourselves up...repeatedly!

With luck he will keep on settling well.

I've been there / am there, OP. One of my DC's has a severe phobia and when it's bad it really impacts their daily life, and hence our family life. I totally understand that sense of constant gnawing anxiety and being hyper vigilance to any sign that they are struggling. I can never really relax fully. I sometimes feel that I've developed their phobia by proxy because I'm so sensitive to their triggers. No advice but solidarity.

Thanks both. Yeah, and I end up worrying about stupid things - like homework, and his decisions about what/when to do things. If he decides to leave something to the weekend (which is a decision he needs to be left to make himself), I then get anxious he will get a lot of other work, be overloaded and have meltdown etc etc 😂Totally stupid I know, and I would never have worried about this (and left him to learn from his mistakes) if I was not so hypervigilant in trying to avoid him getting upset/anxious. But then the only way to learn resilience is to have those challenges and overcome them, so I know I need to leave it. But I am still sat here at work on mumsnet instead of doing my job and feeling unhealthily anxious. I am trying to find time to go to therapy myself as I know that should help, but finding space is so hard!

I had counselling by phone weekly for 2 years to help cope with this. The great thing of by phone is it only takes that time, not travel. I hid in my bedroom and took an extra 30mins after for myself too. It is what kept me going through the worst times, I could just offload.
Then when things got a bit better I started trying to find time for myself and recently I have felt able to go to a weekly choir.
That said things are escalating again and I can already find myself going backwards.