Understanding Childhood Anxiety and How to Talk About It

Childhood anxiety can affect your child’s everyday experience and growth. The best thing for them is to receive support and compassion from those around them while you work together to build coping mechanisms for anxiety.

It can be tempting to encourage and even push young children through experiences that we believe are safe for them. However, suppose they regularly experience intense feelings of anxiety in reaction to everyday experiences. In that case, something else might be going on, such as an anxiety disorder. In these scenarios, continually pushing them may not be best, and a different approach should be used instead.

Between 2016 and 2019, childhood anxiety affected 9.4% of people aged 3-17 in the US, so no one is alone in this.

Signs and Symptoms of Childhood Anxiety

Adults with anxiety can usually express their feelings and will know when something isn’t right. Unfortunately, kids don’t often have the awareness to verbalize how they feel and might not even notice that they are anxious. That is where knowing the signs of childhood anxiety will allow you to identify it for them until they learn to do it themselves.

A child with anxiety will express the following anxiety symptoms:

• Avoiding specific environments, situations, or people
• Avoiding telling the truth about how they feel or being unable to say how they feel when something is not okay
• Regularly making excuses not to go to school
• Issues with sleeping, nightmares, and sleeping alone
• Needing constant reassurance about the past, present, or future.
• Having intense fears that they obsess over. For example, worrying about a mistake they recently made, a school project they are currently working on, or worrying that they or someone they care about will die soon in the future
• Struggling to control their anger or irritability, leading to outbursts
• Finding it hard to sit still, relax, or concentrate
• Experiencing frequent tummy aches

Causes of Childhood Anxiety

There are essentially four leading causes of childhood anxiety.

Cause 1: Stress

Anxiety can develop in reaction to a stressful event and remain after that event has faded into the past. This includes but is not limited to:

• Bullying
• Abuse or neglect
• Frequently moving house, school, or town/city
• Domestic problems, such as parents who regularly fight
• The death of someone close to them
• Experiencing serious illness or injury, be it firsthand or through someone close to them

Cause 2: Regular exposure to someone else’s anxiety

Kids learn from the people around them, and if they spend enough time with someone who struggles with and expresses anxiety openly, they can start showing signs of childhood anxiety as they model their behavior off the adult.

Cause 3: Normal and natural human variation

Everyone is born with unique characteristics; some children are naturally more anxious than others. Anxiety is part of being human, and some people can develop anxiety disorders for no other reason than how their bodies and brains are built.

Cause 4: Anxiety as a symptom of an underlying condition

Children with OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder), ADHD (attention deficit hyperactive disorder), and those on the autistic spectrum are more likely to experience higher anxiety levels.

Tips for Explaining Childhood Anxiety to Your Kid

Understandably, young children aren’t going to understand what they are feeling on their own or with a logical, adult explanation. Once you see the signs of childhood anxiety, you can break the conversation down into the following two stages, each with discussion prompts that you can try.

Stage 1: Explaining anxiety at a child’s level

Anxiety can be an emotion you feel in your head, like when you get lots of “bad thoughts” or when you worry something bad is going to happen. It can also be a sensation in your body, such as a tight chest, rapid breathing, shaking, and a sore stomach. Ask your child if they feel one or both of these when feeling bad.

You can also describe anxiety as a feeling just like happiness, sadness, anger, or hope. To practice talking about and identifying anxiety, try a little exercise where they describe different emotions they already know and see if they can explain how anxiety feels using comparisons.

Tell them that even though anxiety doesn’t feel nice, it is not dangerous, and they are not in danger just because they have anxiety. Reassure them that everything is okay and that anxiety is normal for everyone. They don’t have to hide their feelings because you understand.

Stage 2: Show them how to be open with how they feel

Lead by example and be emotionally vulnerable with your child first to show them it’s okay. They will probably worry about being open and honest if they have anxiety, so you need to take the lead to start with.

Tell them about a time when you had anxiety. Tell them in detail how it felt for you, what situation you were in, and how you overcame it (or if it went away on its own). You can then ask them to share a story about anxiety, similar to what you just did.

If they struggle to identify one instance, you can also ask them:

• What are some of the things that you are worried about?
• Is there something scary that you think about a lot?

Listen intently and don’t interrupt or talk over them whenever they are talking. Validate their feelings, and let them know how proud you are of them for having the strength to talk about something hard.

We are more likely to understand feelings and behaviors if we have experienced them personally. That is why, instead of just telling your child what anxiety is, you should have an open discussion and relate it to their feelings and experiences.

This way, they will be able to identify it more effectively in the future and gain a better understanding as they grow.