Anxiety and worry are normal healthy emotions and all children experience anxiety and worry from time to time. It can be useful to view anxiety as a functional and even at times helpful emotion. It is part of the normal biological fear response that is essential for our survival to keep us safe. Its purpose is to provide your child or teen with useful messages about threats in their world to protect them and keep them safe. There are times when anxiety and fear will be useful, for example, when we are in real danger, such as crossing a busy road, when we have sit an important test or perform well in a sporting event. Anxiety can be a normal reaction to a threatening situation and is a kind of alarm system that helps our body direct energy to where it is needed.
Anxiety is often recognised by changes to your child or teen’s thinking, feelings and behaviour. This is known as the ABC of Anxiety. It affects us in three ways:
A – Affect (anxiety changes the way we feel)
B – Behaviour (anxiety changes the way we behave)
C – Cognition (anxiety changes the way we think)
Parents of anxious children often wonder what the cause was of their child’s anxiety in the first place and whether it might be their fault. They often blame themselves and tend to make assumptions about what they have done wrong and try and look back on their parenting for any mistakes they may have made.
Although no one knows the exact reason why some children are more anxious than others, there is never one single thing that causes anxiety. Researchers believe that it is likely a number of different reasons combine together to cause anxiety in children and teenagers.
In recent years, there has been a growing concern about the rise in school-related anxiety, particularly among children and adolescents. This phenomenon, often referred to as "school refusal" or "school phobia," isn’t just about kids avoiding school because they don’t want to go, it’s a much deeper issue. In many cases, it’s anxiety-driven, where the thought of going to school triggers overwhelming feelings of fear and distress.
School refusal is more than a child refusing to get out of bed in the morning or dragging their feet to the car. It’s about them feeling like they genuinely can’t go to school. This anxiety makes school feel like a place that isn’t safe, even though it might not appear dangerous to everyone else. In this article, we’ll take a closer look at school anxiety, why it happens, and what we as parents, educators, and community members can do to help.
Read more: Understanding School Anxiety and How to Help Kids Overcome It
Anxiety only becomes a problem if it causes excessive distress and significant inference in your child or teens life. It may have now become a ‘false alarm’ that is triggered at any sign of a situation that your child or teen sees as worrying or scary, even if the threat has passed or was never really there. Although some fears are common in children at certain stages in their life, if they do not grow out of these fears, they can become more not less anxious as they grow up.
This article provides six in depth signs that your child’s anxiety is problematic to help guide you.
