Children of anxious parents are more likely to be anxious, and the reasons are both inherited and learned. The learned part is the part you can do something about, and it happens through three fairly specific channels.
The three channels
Modelling. Children read your face before they read a situation. Watching a parent scan a room, tense on a bridge, or flinch at a dog teaches a threat assessment more efficiently than any sentence.
Accommodation. The largest one, and the least obvious. When a child is frightened, loving parents remove the frightening thing: they speak for the shy child, they let them skip the party, they check the room, they answer the same question again.
Each of those relieves distress now and teaches that the situation was genuinely dangerous and that the child couldn’t have coped. Accommodation is one of the strongest predictors of childhood anxiety persisting, and it’s done entirely out of love.
Over-control. Intervening before a child struggles. Doing it for them. Preventing the small failures that build competence.
What to do instead
Confidence rather than reassurance. Not “there’s nothing to worry about,” which contradicts their experience. Instead: “that does feel scary, and I think you can handle it.” Validate the feeling, express confidence in the child. This one change does a large amount of work.
Stop answering the repeated question. Agree it in advance, kindly, with a phrase you reuse: “we have talked about that one, and I know you can manage the not-knowing.”
Let them do the hard small thing. Order their own food. Ask the shop assistant. Go into the party alone. Every one of these is an exposure with a lifetime of compounding.
Show them coping rather than calm. You don’t have to be unafraid. Saying “I feel nervous about this and I am going to do it anyway” is more useful than a performance of composure, because it models the thing you actually want them to learn.
Treat your own anxiety
The evidence here is unusually clear and worth stating plainly: treating parental anxiety improves child outcomes, sometimes without the child being treated at all.
If the anxiety is significant, working on your own is one of the higher-leverage things available to you as a parent, and it isn’t a self-indulgence.
SPACE, if your child won’t engage
Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions, developed at Yale, works entirely through the parents: reducing accommodation, increasing supportive responses. Trials find it performs comparably to child-delivered CBT, with the child never attending a session.
For families with an anxious child who refuses treatment, it’s the most useful thing available.
The guilt
Anxious parents read this and conclude they have damaged their children. Worth resisting: recognising accommodation isn’t evidence of harm done, it’s the point at which it becomes changeable. Children are considerably more robust than the anxious parental imagination allows, and the changes above work at any age.