With anxiety off the charts as a growing epidemic among children and teens, we’ve spent all this week looking at strategies you can employ to prevent anxiety in the kids you know and love. Today I want to share a strategy that can push back against social anxiety, which is one of the most prominent forms of anxiety we hear about in the youth population. While it's essential that we all involve ourselves in Christian fellowship with other members of the body of Christ, it’s especially helpful for our kids to be assimilated into two specific groups. First, involvement in a caring Christian youth group community provides shelter from the pressures of the larger real-life peer group and the virtual peer group found on social media. And second, our kids need to be integrated into the larger body of Christ where they can interact with a variety of caring adults. Never underestimate the power of Christian community to foster healthy spiritual growth and development. Your kids were made for it.

With anxiety off the charts as a growing epidemic among children and teens, we’re spending all this week looking at strategies you can employ to prevent anxiety in the kids you know and love. Research is showing that one of the greatest catalysts for anxiety is immersion in social media. The use of technology has created an expectation that things should happen fast, in fact, immediately. When technology slows or we don’t get an immediate response we become anxious. Social media also sets up unrealistic standards for physical appearance and beauty. Consequently, kids and adults anxiously fabricate and curate images of self that aren’t even close to being honest. We become anxious if we can’t hit the standard. And, we fear being found out and seen for who we really are. Finally, when our kids have their faces constantly buried in their devices, they miss out on the flourishing that comes with living in the real world. Social media is not all bad. But too much leads to anxiety.

With anxiety off the charts as a growing epidemic among children and teens, we’re spending all this week looking at strategies you can employ to prevent anxiety in the kids you know and love. One of the best ways to prevent anxiety is to stop overscheduling your kids. Research on today’s culture points to the fact that our kids are so over-involved and feeling such incredible pressure to achieve at the highest levels in all of their activities, that they are crumbling under the pressure. One way to push back is to be sure that your kids are eating right, getting enough exercise, and sleeping nightly for the nine hours and fifteen minutes of uninterrupted sleep that’s necessary for healthy growth and development. In addition, we must recognize the fact that God made us for a rhythm of work and rest. This includes the need for a Sabbath. What would happen if we recovered the practice of taking one day a week to rest? I’m sure we would see a decline in anxiety.