How to Recognize if Your Child has Anxiety
Note: Author is diagnosed with Generalized Anxiety Disorder and Social Anxiety and first showed significant symptoms before starting elementary school.
Anxiety is More Common Than You Think
More than 9% of children between the ages of 13-17 have been diagnosed with anxiety, and more than 36% of children with behavioral problems have been diagnosed with anxiety disorders.
Anxiety isn’t just prominent in people with diagnosed disorders though. Anxiety is something everyone experiences, and whether it’s chronic or not everyone is reactive in one way or another due to that anxiety.
Differences of Anxiety in Children vs. Adults
Anxiety in adults is generally pretty recognizable to most people. It has fairly consistent symptoms that are directly associated with anxiety including physical like trouble breathing, heart palpitations, and severe unjustified panic or dread.
Children with anxiety tend to experience similar symptoms, but because they are children experiencing the world in a very different way from adults, they tend to exhibit it differently.
Signs of Anxiety in Children
Kids with anxiety, especially anxiety disorders on the more severe side, often manifests as clinginess, tantrums, and physical complaints like stomach aches or headaches.
Tantrums, clinginess, and other behavioral issues come from children not knowing how to express what they are feeling, and instead acting out in search of getting their needs met.
Kids don’t know what they are feeling or why, and that combined with the inability to express it makes for a mixture of frustration, confusion, and even more anxiety. It also manifests in very specific ways, such as:
1. Clinginess
Not wanting to leave a specific person or thing because that thing brings them comfort and reliability, and they aren’t quite sure it will come back.
Needing Reassurance
Anxiety, especially childhood anxiety, comes with a lot of uncertainty and, in my own personal experience, that can lead to a constant need for reassurance and double checking things like permission and plans.
For example, ‘If you ask me one more time I’m going to say no,’ was a phrase I heard frequently.
Tantrums
read: Big reactions to small changes.
A huge part of anxiety, especially in children, is feeling extremely out of control, and having a routine or otherwise reliable thing removed on top of that results in a child feeling things like helpless, unsure, confused, unable to trust future plans, and more.
Defiance and other Behavioral Problems
Similarly, kids struggling with anxiety who are feeling out of control are likely to make a grab for it when they can, and end up labeled defiant because they need things to go as planned or in a specific way.
When asked why they’re feeling a certain way, they can’t articulate why.
Restlessness
Similarly to adults with anxiety, kids can experience restlessness.
As kids, that restlessness translates to not sitting still or paying attention in various settings, especially high stress places like school.
What can anxiety be mistaken for?
Anxiety in children is primarily misdiagnosed or mistaken for ADHD and/or other behavior problems including Oppositional Defiant Disorder.
In many cases it is assumed children are being difficult on purpose, rather than out of instinct or as a reaction to a situation or environment.
How and Why To Treat It Differently
Anxiety, first and foremost, needs to be acknowledged as anxiety, and then treated as anxiety.
Kids acting and reacting in specific ways should be understood as something borne of what feels to them like necessity and lack of options.
Treating it as such and providing reassurance and support instead of reprimanding provides an opportunity to minimize or at least manage anxiety.
Anxiety treated like anxiety with things like therapy and coping mechanisms give children a chance to improve at least a bit before they go from kids with anxiety to adults with even worse anxiety due to them not being addressed or supported.
