Experts tell parents how to help their kids through their anxiety

(CNN) — My 11-year-old son knows how he will respond to a school shooting.His plan, which he told me recently after his school’s latest lockdown drill, is to jump out of a window and make a run for it. We sat in my bed for an hour past bedtime, talking about and navigating his anxiety together.It’s not just mass shootings that worry him. His mind fixates and overthinks what’s happening in his personal life and what he absorbs from the outside world. That chaos has a way of invading his peace, and soon I know we will have another midnight worry session.What is happening between my son and me isn’t unusual. A lot of our kids are still struggling with their mental health, and parents are concerned.“We have an influx of information, and all of these things together create a lot of anxiety that is just built into the culture,” said Maria Evans, who coauthored the book “Raising Calm Kids in a World of Worry: Tools to Ease Anxiety and Overwhelm” with Ashley Graber. Evans and Graber are licensed marriage and family therapists and parenting coaches.I talked to them about helping our kids navigate through a world that seems to...