Will Social Anxiety Keep Your Child From Succeeding in School?

With the ringing of the first classroom bell to signal the start of a new school year, two images often come to mind: children excited about seeing old friends and their favorite teacher, or the endearing scene of a shy child clinging to his mother’s leg.

But what if the latter scenario is not as innocent as popular culture depicts? In the most recent Care For Your Mind (CFYM) series, experts associated with the Anxiety and Depression Association of America shed light on a debilitating but little known disorder, social anxiety disorder (SAD) that effects 12% of youth. Often first appearing in grade school, this disorder can be treated and managed with the right support and professional help.

Mark Pollack, M.D. president of the Anxiety and Depression Association of America believes lack of awareness about the disorder among medical providers and the general public prevent people from getting help for this treatable condition.

Parents can play a primary role in getting the support their children need, but only if they recognize the symptoms. In a CFYM poll 71% of respondents stated they did not think most parents would recognize SAD in their own children. Anne Marie Albano, Ph.D., Director, Columbia University Clinic for Anxiety and Related Disorders underscores the need for parental recognition when she states that, “social phobia is a gateway disorder to depression, substance abuse, and lifetime impairment.” In her post she provides warning signs and symptoms parents should be aware of.

Dr. Albano also suggests that parents unwittingly exasperate the situation when they step in and speak for their children. For example, when unable to answer a question addressed to them, parents might make excuses, such as “Johnny is shy.” While well-intentioned, by managing a stressful situation for their children, parents inadvertently enable them to avoid dealing with the emotions and anxiety these situations provoke.

As the school year begins, we must also ask whether or not there is a role for schools in helping parents recognize the symptoms of SAD in their child and provide therapeutic support. Dr. Albano points out that the very place that is causing the stress, could be the best place to learn how to deal with it.

Many schools offer screenings and teachers are taught how to identify the disorder. Once permission has been obtained from parents, schools provide in-school or after school therapy.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is considered to be one of the more successful tools to support children living with SAD. The National Alliance of Mental Illness (NAMI) describes CBT as a “form of treatment that focuses on examining the relationships between thoughts, feelings and behaviors.” CBT is usually associated with an end date. The goal is not long protracted therapy, but rather brief intervention to provide the child with tools to help them manage stressful situations that trigger SAD symptoms.

Teaching about SAD in traditional health classes is another way to create awareness about the disorder. Unfortunately, however, the symptoms of the disorder such as fear of talking to adults or authority figures can prevent a child from seeking help.

Given these facts, positioned alongside the positive results of early intervention, seeking funding for in-school screening and treatment is an idea that is long overdue. Why not bring it up at the first parent teacher organization or school council meeting? Talk to school administrators and teachers to gain support. Make it your calling to be an advocate for children.

http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2014/09/02/will-social-anxiety-keep-your-child-from-succeeding-in-school/

Is the crippling anxiety over exams what we want for our children?

The driving despair that has foreshadowed A-level results may well be a price too high

Ecstasy after the agony: A-level students for whom the effort paid off Photo: Christopher Pledger/The Telegraph

Today is a big day at Pearson Towers and in homes across the land. The Daughter will get her A-level results, which should be nerve-wracking, only the anxiety has been superseded by a deeper dread.

For today is also the day she goes in for an operation. “Look on the bright side, Mum, I won’t be upset if I don’t get the A in History because I’ll be unconscious,” she says, trying to joke away our fears, hers and mine. We know the surgeon is among the best in the country, we know the procedure should be relatively straightforward. We know that in 10 days she should be better, much better, than she has been for years. We know, we know, but no one wants their child put to sleep, do they?

And yet, in some bizarre way, I realise that I am almost grateful for the fact of the surgery. My child’s vulnerability has blunted the claws of the nightmare Tiger Mother I know I would have been given half a chance. It has taught me perspective, which is seriously lacking in an age obsessed with exam grades and league tables, itself a kind of national sickness for which there is only one known cure: AAA.

One 19-year-old who will not be opening her results with trepidation this morning is Amy Latham. A couple of months ago, it was reported that Amy, a pupil at the Queen Elizabeth School in Wimborne, Dorset, appeared to have killed herself while suffering dreadful anxiety over A-levels. In the weeks before her disappearance, Amy had expressed fears about her exams on social media. On June 5, she posted on Twitter: “Option 1: stay in, cry over Macbeth notes, fail English A-level Option 2: go out, cry over ignored responsibilities, fail English A-level.” On May 15, she said: “Someone kill me before I f--- up my English exam for the second time.”

Those tweets make me want to weep. For one thing, a young woman who could come up with Options 1 and 2 had no difficulties with English. Even in her dread, Amy was wittily alert to the cruel irony of her situation. She sounds fabulous. How could a bright young woman like that be so terrified of messing up her A-level that she chose to hang herself? Let me try and guess.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationopinion/11031251/Is-the-crippling-anxiety-over-exams-what-we-want-for-our-children.html

Back-to-School Anxiety: A Parent’s Guide

Back-to-School anxiety hits students of all ages. But you and your children don’t have to suffer in silence.

Victor Schwartz, associate professor of psychiatry at the NYU School of Medicine, walks us through the roots of school anxiety, and what we can do to help students handle their fears.

Preschool

Root of Anxiety: Until preschool, life has centered on home, parents or familiar caretakers. Then, bam! Young children have to negotiate interactions with strange teachers and other kids.

How to Help: First, stay calm because your anxiety is contagious. And prepare your child by arranging play dates away from home and even overnight stays with trusted friends and family. Let them know they’ll be OK, but in a matter-of-fact way that makes them think you really believe it.

Kindergarten – 3rd Grade

Root of Anxiety: Can I live up to teachers’ expectations? Learn my multiplication tables? Handle homework?

How to Help: Here’s where you begin to teach your children the good study habits that will lead to school success. Don’t do homework for them, but help them discover how to get from point A to B; how to recover from mistakes; how to be persistent. Playing board and card games are good ways to teach these lessons indirectly.

4th – 6th Grade

Root of Anxiety: Schoolwork now centers around long-term projects, and school social life forms into cliques – two scary propositions for many children.

How to Help: Before school starts, plan activities that stress persistence, organization and deferred gratification. Making model planes, ships and trains teach organization and tenacity. Studying an instrument teaches how to navigate short-term frustration for long-term gains. Even video games – yes, video games — help kids persist until they get to the next level.

Middle School

Root of Anxiety: It’s a wonder anyone makes it through these wonder years when romantic and sexual feelings begin to blossom, social competitiveness reaches fever pitch, and even thoughts about college and future success emerge.

How to Help: Be sensitive to the turmoil, and help kids find a range of pleasurable activities outside school that enable them to find success and forge friendships – sports teams, community center groups; theater clubs. Share stories about your middle school struggles, but don’t give a happy, pat ending (which probably isn’t true). Kids see through that and turn off to future fables.

High School

Root of Anxiety: High school students are battered at both ends – raging hormones that feed charged emotional and sexual situations, and real concerns about their futures – college, jobs, marriage. They’re bombarded by advertising that tells them they’re not good enough (that’s how you sell products), and by adults that pressure them to succeed. This is the age where depression, anxiety, food and obsessive disorders emerge.

How to Help: Try to find time – family dinners, vacations, driving in the car – to share your definition of success: hopefully, it’s not which designer bag you carry or elite college you attended. And recognize that your emotional state is catching, and try not to worry about the same things that are plaguing your kid.

College

Root of Anxiety: Separation anxiety emerges again as your freshman prepares for life away from home, maybe for the first time. New college students worry about fitting into a whole, new social world and failing academically. If they’re paying for their own education, financial worries may also keep them up at night.

How to Help: Make sure they leave for college knowing how to do their own laundry, handle a debit card, and whom to ask for help when they need it. Talk to them about the life/work balance, which they’ll have to navigate throughout their lives. And discuss practical things like food choices, sleep routines, and how drugs and alcohol never solve problems.

When It’s Time to Get Professional Help

Most back-to-school anxiety is normal and manageable. But sometimes fears – yours and your kids’ – take over.

Here’s when to seek professional help.

• Anxiety is more intense than usual.

• Anxiety doesn’t get better over time.

• Anxiety interferes with eating and sleeping.

• Activities that usually reduce stress, don’t work.

http://www.care2.com/greenliving/back-to-school-anxiety-a-parents-guide.html

Anxious parents often have anxious children, study shows

Anxiety disorders are common in children, and new research shows they may be partially hereditary.

“As many as 65 percent of children of parents with anxiety disorders meet criteria for an anxiety disorder,” wrote Golda Ginsberg, a researcher for John Hopkins University School of Medicine, in a report about childhood anxiety.

The study followed 40 families that all had at least one parent with an anxiety disorder and no children who exhibited symptoms. Half the families received therapy through a “coping and promoting strength program,” and half received no therapy. One-third of the families who did not receive therapy had children who developed anxiety disorders after a year of observation, but no children developed anxiety in the families that received therapy.

According to the National Institute of Mental Health, 8 percent of teenagers ages 13 through 18 have an anxiety disorder, and the symptoms usually manifest around age six.

Anxiety can manifest in children for a variety of reasons, including post-traumatic stress disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder and specific fear stimulants. However, “children of parents with anxiety disorders are two to seven times more likely to have an anxiety disorder compared with children from families in which neither parent has an anxiety disorder,” Ginsberg states in the report.

In reporting on the study, NPR told the story of a young boy, Noah, who feared school because he was afraid of throwing up. He could only stay at school the entire day if he was allowed to call home as often as he needed.

His mother, Heather Cummings, experienced similar anxiety when she was young. “In science I’d read about a condition and think I had it, cancer or diabetes, for example,” she told NPR. “If I bumped my head I’d think I’d get a concussion. If I got hit in the temple I’d watch the clock because I thought I was going to die.”

The strong correlation between parent anxiety and child anxiety suggests causation, therefore, parental support is instrumental in helping children overcome their anxiety, says Noah’s psychotherapist, Lynn Lyons.

“It’s important that you have the same expectations of your anxious child that you would of another child,” psychologist Lynne Siqueland told the Anxiety and Depression Association of America.

Parents who also suffer from an anxiety disorder may struggle to know how to help their child. Their own anxiety is compounded by worry for their child, and they may wish to protect and overly reassure their child rather than help them be strong.

Anxiety BC, a resource group, offers several ways parents can help, beyond the preventative therapy advised by Ginsberg’s study. Parents can have older children and teenagers learn to understand and face the source of their fears, and “younger children...can benefit from coming up with some coping statements that they can say to themselves to help them deal with feelings of fear or anxiety. ”

For example, ‘It won’t go on forever, it will end.’”

According to Anxiety BC, the most important thing a parent can do is help their child understand that they are not alone with their anxiety, and that they can overcome it.

http://www.timesonline.com/healthandwellness/anxious-parents-often-have-anxious-children-study-shows/article_b04685c1-5ad9-5866-aa5e-7982152f94f7.html