4 ways to use CBT to make parenting a virtual student more bearable

4 ways to use CBT to make parenting a virtual student more bearable

At 8:30 am every weekday, my still pajama-clad family disperses to our semi-private corners of our home. My four children log on to their now entirely virtual public school, just as I remotely open shop for my family therapy practice. I use Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), a type of talk therapy that focuses on our thinking distortions and how they make us feel, to help parents struggling with virtual school. Previously confident parents are now doubting their skills while juggling work, attentive parenting, and our new roles as unpaid proctors to our child’s virtual school. Many have experienced panic while catching their child on YouTube or playing video games during their school Google Meet. Some are crushed by guilt and self-blame when teachers check in about their child’s poor virtual attendance or missing assignments. In the 15 minute breaks between my therapy sessions, I check in with each kid, and am sometimes humbled by my own emotionally-charged interactions.

Even as a parenting therapist, I find parenting in this new reality legitimately hard.

However, using CBT, I can measurably change my clients’ (and my!) negative emotions. Here are 4 ways to shake those parenting anxieties in the age of COVID-19:

1. Clarify what you can and cannot control about your child’s education.

The most powerful exercise I use in my practice is startlingly simple. I have my clients create two columns on a paper for their worries: “Things I can control” and “Things I cannot control.” This exercise highlights that many worries are not actionable. For example, parents might worry about when the schools will open back up or how much their child will fall behind during a COVID-19 quarantine. In session, we practice letting go and accepting the things we cannot control.

Next, I ask clients to evaluate what might be holding them back from dealing with the worries that are actionable. Many times, it might be the anxiety itself! Fear can make us avoid dealing with even a simple task. Some parents report that they avoid logging on to their child’s assignment portal even though they feel they “should.” They dread seeing the confirmation that their child is falling behind or missing work. And so, we stew in anxiety, torturing ourselves with our “should” statements, but not taking steps to remedy the problem.

2. Catch those anxious thoughts

The first step to combating anxious thinking is recognizing it as such. Sometimes we are so focused on the bad feelings that we don’t notice the bad thoughts that came first! I train my clients to catch those anxious thoughts and give them a label: anxiety. Next time you casually think: “My child isn’t learning anything,” I want you to just as casually and non-judgmentally add a second thought: “That was anxiety talking.” Just notice and label your anxious thoughts, without criticizing yourself for having them. Reshaping our parenting patterns requires the same basic ingredients as parenting itself: lots of empathy and attention.

Another trick when we catch those anxious thoughts is to try to reframe. It can be as simple as changing one word in our negative self-talk. Let’s take the earlier example of “I should be checking my child’s assignments.” The word “should” is a red flag for a common CBT distortion, wherein a person creates additional pressure for themselves with their high expectations and their disappointment. The ”should” statement is pure anxiety because it is by nature a self-criticism, rather than a goal. If I catch a client verbalizing this negative distortion, I might ask her to reframe it with a concrete statement like “I will check my child’s assignments tonight after dinner.”

3. Redirect the “what if” spirals

CBT shows us that much of our anxiety lives in the realm of the “what if.” Anxiety is a future-focused emotion. Anxious parents might spin their present schooling worry into a “what if” that spans the rest of their child’s lives. However, we as parents (and humans!) are bad fortune-tellers. Our brains often feed us improbable worst-case outcomes. Given our collective pain in 2020, many are more primed for such catastrophic thinking. If you catch yourself on a “what if” spiral, try simply interrupting this line of thinking with a deep breath and a redirection of your attention elsewhere.

A more advanced CBT technique for tackling the “what if” spiral is to give yourself a designated and limited time to worry about your ultimate fear. During this “worry block,” ask yourself and let your mind go to that dark outcome that is at the core of your anxiety. Agree to redirect and limit your thinking about your dreaded outcome all other times of the day. Sometimes spending five minutes in the morning truly focused on facing your worst-case scenario, is just what your brain needs to examine your imagined catastrophe and deflate it.

4. Thought exercise: Thanksgiving 2030

Things feel really big close up. In CBT terms, this is the distortion of magnification. This year, I have asked many clients to visualize Thanksgiving 2030. Imagine sitting with this older version of your kids, on the 10-year anniversary of the nation's battle with COVID. What do you think will be important to you then? Most parents answer a version of “that we got through it together as a family.” Few believe that they will remember or care about a few missed assignments or a child’s math grade. Big picture thought exercises give us context and remind us that virtual school (and the unique demands it places on parents) is temporary.

The greatest feat we can accomplish as parents during the pandemic is a safe journey through this trying period with the most serenity and togetherness we can muster. The opposite of anxiety is a feeling of safety and comfort. Instead of seeing ourselves as adjunct educators, let us instead lean back into our roles as comforters and caretakers.

Let us teach our kids what we know how to teach best: that they are loved, that they are safe, and that they are not alone.

Learn about how Parenting Therapy at South Boulder Counseling can help you here.

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Parenting during COVID-19: The Socially Anxious Child in Virtual School

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