SmileTutor Blog Tutors Tutoring Tips How To Tutor Children With Anxiety Problems

How To Tutor Children With Anxiety Problems

Singapore parents are now turning to private tutors for their assistance. You play an important role as their tutor, to help these children bring together what they need to master and what is taught in class to make them successful students. Nevertheless, children with clinical anxiety stand to gain more as after class tutoring will help offer them relief from stress. This further helps build their academic and emotional strengths. After school tutoring helps create skill and familiarity the various subjects learned in school. It also helps improve a child’s self-esteem and soft skills they need to succeed in life and academically as well.

With the right structuring of the tuition, your tutee’s learning will be improved greatly and the anxiety addressed successfully. There are studies that have done in the recent time that make this possible thus your tutee can now attend school and successfully learn like the other students.

We will help you pick the right structure of tutoring to address your tutee’s anxiety even for those children that experience chronic anxiety. One-on-one and independent tutoring will help him develop comfort and strength in any social setting. He will also have increased self-belief in his abilities to study.

Understanding How Anxiety Impede Learning

Based on the Harvard’s Center for the Developing Child working-paper, continual fear and anxiety do affect young children’s development and learning. The anxiety is said to have a greater impact the child’s learning and that it could be complex than what most people may realize. It was even noted that children who suffer from anxiety normally do not unlearn the fears. This means that a child may experience the same anxieties in regards to learning and social circumstances well into adulthood.

Exclusive offer for first-time customers only!
Get 15% discount off your first lesson and no agency fees! Choose from a selection of reliable home tutors and keep learning even while at home. Claim this promotion today.

The report further acknowledged and revealed that when a child experiences prolonged anxiety, the child will over time lose its cognitive ability to tell the difference between safe environments and threatening or dangerous situations. This is noticeable particularly in children who may have had a traumatic life occurrence, physical abuse, and chronic emotional experiences.

Anxiety Reduces Learning Capacity

The Child Mind Institute studies show that anxiety in children reduces their learning capacity in the following ways:

The child’s experiences increased frustration and have low motivation in completing exercises and assignments given to them.
The child may be experiencing fear of being ridiculed by their peers which will prevent clarification and discussion of instructions.
There is a reduced willingness for a child to ask a parent or a teacher for help.
The child may have increased disorganization, restlessness and even inattention.
A lot of learning disorders are often times accompanied by anxiety. This can sometimes be mistaken for disorders related to anxiety and thus it remains unresolved all through the child’s academic journey.

It, however, is very important to understand that children will not be able to perform their best especially when the skills they have been hindered by things like separation, social and general anxiety.

Need More Than Patience

During this time, your tutee needs a lot more patience to help him work through the anxiety. In being patient with your student, he is then able to calm down and be more cooperative in what doing what he is expected to do. Adding pressure to the child does not help solve the issue, it instead serves in increasing the anxiety level in the child thus it’s counterproductive.

Always Listen To Their Worries

Always allow your student to talk about the worries and fears. Encourage your students to express their fears and worries freely and try not to ask leading questions. Let the child find its own words and even express things as they are experiencing them. When you have to use question for further clarity of what your tutee is going through, try using open-ended questions. This way you will avoid feeding the anxiety cycle.

Use More Positive Speech And Praises

Tutors should use more positive speech and positive feedback on their children. This will let your student understand and know that you recognize what they are going through and their efforts of expressing it.

Another important time to praise your student is when they make an effort to face their stressor. This will further encourage them to keep working at getting comfortable in the stressful situation as still remain calm.

Keep Abreast Of Any Anxiety Attacks That Happen Outside Of Lessons

Although your student will greatly benefit from after-school tutoring, it is also important to look for occasions and settings that will trigger him into experience anxiety attacks. This setting may well be outside classroom settings. This will help you recognize the triggers early and be able to help him in addressing the issues early on in life. Work closely with the child’s teachers and parents so that everyone is on alert and able to update each other of an anxiety attack.

Want to be a better tutor?
Join 50,000 Singapore tutors and subscribe to our newsletter to learn how to teach better and earn a better income.
You have successfully joined our subscriber list.

As a tutor, you will also be able to eliminate other suspected causes and contributing factors to your child’s anxiety level by increasing his confidence level. After school tutoring will also help your student address other areas besides the academic aspect. Your student will learn to socialize and be confident in their abilities as well as increase their self-esteem.

Some issues that your student may be struggling with may include social anxiety, separation, and generalized anxieties as well as specific phobias. In being able to identify what may be causing him anxiety, a quick remedy can be sought together with his parents. This will, in turn, help him all through his life. He will be better prepared and be able to face any situations that may cause him any discomfort with ease.

Conclusion

Private tutoring for children with anxiety problems is very beneficial. The child learns to trust in his learning capabilities, socializing as well as being comfortable in classroom settings. The right structuring of special needs tutoring offered to your student will help improve his learning and also address the anxiety cause successfully.

Interested in helping your students to perform their best? Here are some articles that may help you:

How to Develop Critical Thinking Skills in Your Students
How to Use the ‘Flipped Classroom’ Technique to Tutor More Effectively

Rum Tan

Rum Tan is the founder of SmileTutor and he believes that every child deserves a smile. Motivated by this belief and passion, he works hard day & night with his team to maintain the most trustworthy source of home tutors in Singapore. In his free time, he writes articles hoping to educate, enlighten, and empower parents, students, and tutors. You may try out his free home tutoring services via smiletutor.sg or by calling 6266 4475 directly today.