The Essential Guide to Treating Child and Adolescent Anxiety

Supporting anxious kids means empowering anxious parents.

Clinical psychologist Dr. Steve O’Brien knows firsthand how challenging, even overpowering, it can be when a child presents with anxiety. So often, their struggles send a ripple effect that disrupts the entire family system.

In The Essential Guide to Treating Child and Adolescent Anxiety, clinicians will find an integrative, whole-family approach for treating the most common anxiety-related issues in childhood, including school fears, social anxiety, excessive worry, separation anxiety, and more. Drawing from cognitive behavioural, family systems, and client-centred therapies, this book provides over 75 handouts, worksheets, scripts, and tips to help you navigate the most common treatment obstacles so you can empower anxious children and their parents to live healthier, happier lives.

You’ll learn how to:

• Navigate the initial session and build rapport with parents
• Provide child-friendly psychoeducation on anxiety
• Assist families in developing healthier habits to decrease household stress
• Provide intensive parent consultation
• Break the anxiety-reassurance-repeat cycle
• Use the 3 R’s (recognize, relax, redirect) of anxiety management
• Reframe how parents and teachers think about “misbehaviour”
• And more!