Capable: The Inside Job

By Courtney Bledsoe, LCSW | Courtney Bledsoe LCSW PLLC | Oak Park, IL

Most parents of anxious children are working incredibly hard on the wrong thing. Not because they’re doing anything wrong. Because the instinct makes complete sense.

Anxiety has two parts. Most people only think about one of them.

The first part is the fear itself — the bee, the test, the party, the dark. This is the visible part. The part that causes the meltdown at the door, the part parents naturally focus on.

The second part is your child’s belief that they can handle what’s making them anxious. Not whether the thing is actually dangerous. Whether they have what it takes to meet it.

Parents almost always pour their energy into the first part. What actually helps lives in the second.

Whack-a-Mole

When a child is afraid of bees, a parent explains: bees are actually helpful. They won’t bother you if you don’t bother them. Most bees aren’t even interested in you. And sometimes it works — the child seems calmer, less worried about bees specifically.

But then something else comes up. A dog. A thunderstorm. A test. The fear just moves.

This is what I think of as whack-a-mole anxiety management. You put your energy into the fear itself — and you might win that particular round. But you’re never out of a job. Because the work lives entirely outside your child. It depends on you, every time, for every new thing.

There’s something else worth naming: even when the persuasion works, it works because of you. Your research. Your reassurance. Your powers of convincing. Nothing about that process builds anything inside your child. They didn’t learn that they could handle the fear. They learned that you could handle it for them.

That distinction matters more than it might seem.

The Inside Job

There’s another place to put your energy. And it changes everything.

Instead of pouring into the fear itself, you pour into your child’s belief that they can meet it. Not eliminating the anxiety — that’s not the goal, and it’s not possible anyway. But building something inside your child that can face it.

That second part — the belief that they can handle hard things — is what I think of as the inside job. Because unlike reassurance, unlike explanations about bees, it doesn’t live with you. It lives with them. It’s theirs to keep.

A child who is afraid of bees but believes they can handle the feeling of being afraid is in a fundamentally different position than a child who is afraid of bees and also doesn’t believe they can cope. The fear might be identical. The experience of having it is completely different.

What Pouring Into the First Part Looks Like

It looks like love and that’s important to say first.

It looks like researching whether the thing is actually dangerous. Explaining the statistics. Staying on the phone during the scary thing. Answering the question one more time. Checking the stove together. Sitting outside the bathroom door. Driving back to make sure the garage is closed.

It looks like a parent working very hard to make the world feel safe enough for their child to move through it.

The problem isn’t the love. The problem is the math. The world keeps producing new things. New fears, new uncertainties, new moments where your child looks at something and thinks — I don’t know if I can handle this. And if the only answer to that question has always come from outside them, they don’t have practice finding it inside.

You can convince a child that this particular bee is harmless. You cannot convince them, in advance, that they’ll be okay when they sit down for their first job interview. Or wait for college decisions. Or navigate a friendship falling apart. Or stand up in front of a room full of people and speak.

Those moments are coming. And what will carry your child through them isn’t a parent with the right reassurance. It’s something they built, slowly, through a hundred smaller moments of discovering that they could keep going even when things were hard.

What Pouring Into the Second Part Looks Like

It’s less intuitive. And it’s harder in the short term.

It means resisting the urge to fix the fear, and instead staying close while your child feels it. It means communicating — not with words necessarily, but with your whole presence — I know this is hard, and I believe you can handle it. Both parts. Not one without the other.

It means letting your child have the experience of doing something scary and surviving it. Not because you pushed them through it, but because you believed they could get there — and they did.

Every time that happens, something deposits into what I think of as the inner reservoir. A growing, lived conviction that hard things are survivable. That anxiety is not the end of the story. That they have met uncomfortable things before and came out the other side.

That reservoir is what a teenager draws on when they walk into an exam they’re not sure they’re ready for. It’s what a young adult reaches for when they’re waiting to hear back about a job, or sitting across from someone on a first date, or stepping onto a stage. It doesn’t make those moments easy. It makes them possible.

You can’t fill that reservoir for your child. But you can create the conditions for them to fill it themselves. That’s the work. And unlike the whack-a-mole version, you’re building toward the day when they don’t need you to do it anymore.

That’s not a loss. That’s the whole point.

A Note on This Being Hard

None of this is easy to put into practice. In the moment — when your child is distressed and you have the power to make it stop — choosing not to is genuinely difficult. It goes against every parenting instinct you have.

That’s not a flaw. That’s how much you love your child.

But love and strategy aren’t always the same thing. And the most loving thing you can do for an anxious child isn’t always the thing that feels most loving in the moment. Sometimes it’s the harder thing — the stay-close-but-don’t-fix thing, the I-believe-in-you thing — that does the most lasting good.

If This Resonates

If you’re reading this and recognizing the pattern — if you can see the whack-a-mole in your own parenting, the reassurance that works in the moment and then needs to happen again the next day — you haven’t been doing it wrong. You’ve been doing what loving parents do. You just didn’t have this particular piece of the picture.

The good news is that the second part — the inside job — is buildable. It doesn’t require your child to be ready, or willing, or even aware that anything is changing. It starts with you, and how you respond in the small moments. And it compounds. Every time your child discovers they could handle something hard, the reservoir fills a little more. Every time you resist the pull to fix the fear and stay close instead, you’re making a deposit.

That’s slow work. It doesn’t feel dramatic. But it’s the work that lasts — because it ends up inside your child, not inside you.

If you’d like support in making that shift, that’s exactly the kind of support we offer. We work with parents and children in Oak Park, Chicago and across Illinois, helping families move from managing anxiety to building the capacity to meet it. If you’re wondering whether it might be the right fit, we’d love to talk. Free consultations are available — no pressure, just a conversation.

Schedule a free consultation here

Courtney Bledsoe, LCSW, is a therapist specializing in anxiety and OCD in children and adolescents in Oak Park, IL. She is the only certified SPACE provider in Illinois, offering in-person sessions in the Chicago area and western suburbs, and virtual sessions throughout Illinois. Her work focuses on helping families break the anxiety cycle — with or without the child in the therapy room.