How Does Anxiety in Children Affect Their Lives? Is There Hope for Them?

Have you seen children hide behind their parents when they meet new people? Do you wonder why they get uncomfortable and refuse to engage in new settings? Anxiety in children makes it difficult for them to connect with people they are not familiar with. Some adults go through this kind of fear too. You may have experienced that anxiety on your first day at a new workplace or school.

Anxiety in children isn’t easy for other people to understand. You may not know what goes on in your child’s mind when fear creeps in. Their friends may not be able to make sense out of it.

Without understanding, it becomes difficult for you or anybody else to provide the required emotional support. That makes the child with anxiety disorder feel alienated.

How Can You Identify Anxiety In Children Around You?

Before you can provide any emotional support, you must understand how anxiety in children presents itself. Though cases may differ from one child to another, you may want to examine your child for these common characteristics:

1. Experiencing bad dreams leading to inadequate sleep
2. Poor performance at school
3. Poor concentration levels
4.Failure to express themselves to other people
5. Failure to make friends
6. Suffering from panic attacks
7. Constant worries about certain aspects of life such as self, grades, family
8. Feeling nauseated and other pains
9. Feeling misjudged
10. Experiencing extreme sadness or other anxiety disorders

According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DMS-5), anxiety disorder goes beyond the time expected for a child to fear new environments. It is different from the ordinary fear. It causes the child to imagine that something bad is going to happen at any time.

Common Types Of Anxiety In Children

Separation Anxiety

This is where children fear being separated from people they know, such as their parents or guardians. It causes them to experience sadness, homesickness, and fear that those they know are in danger. It exists in children beyond the age of three years.

Your child could refuse to sleep in their room alone citing that they are afraid. They could also wake up in panic after experiencing bad dreams from time to time. This should concern you especially if it happens several times in a week. The disrupted sleeping patterns result in lack of adequate rest. This affects the child’s ability to concentrate in class and causes poor overall performance.

Separation anxiety disorder can go beyond your child’s early age into their teenage years and on to adulthood. Their inability to have social connections with other people can cause them to remain unmarried contrary to their wishes. It can also result in depression as they are not able to open up to people who are in a position to help.

In your effort to help your child, you may allow the child to sleep in your room or let them stay at home whenever they don’t feel comfortable going to school. In the event that there are other children in the family, those children feel left out when you give more attention only one of them. Though you meant to help, your actions may end up straining the whole family. This can go even further, destroying your relationship with your spouse as you seek to protect the child with the anxiety disorder.

Selective Mutism

In this case, the child refuses to talk when expected to. At home, they may chat without restrictions but opt to remain silent at school. They seem to choose whom to speak to at any one time. They are afraid of speaking to people outside their family circle. This causes them not to make friends, fear making eye contact and seem antisocial.

Observe whether your child is uncomfortable while speaking to everyone else except close family members. You may notice that they chat with you all the way to school but as soon as you drop them off at school, they recoil. When other people try speaking to them, they become expressionless.

Fear causes them not to want to engage in conversations with their peers and teachers. It is therefore not surprising that the child is seen as rude or stubborn. Knowing that this is not the case, they end up frustrated because they feel misunderstood. Their inability to tell those around them that they are experiencing anxiety denies them the opportunity to receive the necessary emotional support.

Selective mutism is not the same as when the child doesn’t understand the subject being discussed. It is also not a speech related disorder or any other disorder such as a case of autism. You will notice a clear distinction between when you are with the child and when they are in a different social setting. They may extend this silence to relatives who don’t live with them as well as friends. Their inability to hold verbal communication hinders them from making friends.

Unless a teacher is able to recognize this fear in a child, their ability to help them is limited. Teachers should watch out for other ways that the child tries to express themselves before concluding that they have a problem. Such ways could include pointing at things that they mean to talk about.

When your child’s teacher reports to you that your child is disobedient, you may choose to withdraw them from that school. This increases the negative effect on their behavior because you have not addressed the anxiety problem in the first place.

Anxiety disorders can diminish your child’s interest in pursuing their education. In fact, it is reported that 75% of all kids with anxiety disorders at one point refuse to attend school. This is because they worry to the point of not concentrating at school. If not treated, anxiety in children will affect them all the way into their adulthood.

When they are still young, children with an anxiety disorder may not understand what the fear in them is all about. But as they enter the teenage years they begin to notice the difference between them and their friends who can express themselves better. Out of the need to banish this fear, they may try various things in the hope of improving. This may lead to more fear, guilt, and embarrassment over the situation, and can affect their self-esteem.

While such a child is experiencing trouble trying to manage their fear, those close to them find it a challenge to cope with them. The best way forward is to seek help from a professional counselor. Both the child and their parents should undergo counseling. The child gets help in managing the anxiety while the parent is taught how to provide emotional support to the child.

As a parent, if you have noticed any symptoms mentioned in this article in your child, know that there is hope. Professional counselors can help you understand anxiety in children and even help your child get better. Take this opportunity to give your child a new life free from anxiety; a life that they deserve. Contact us today, we are here to help.