Everyone can relate to feeling anxiety. Maybe it comes when you’re driving to work and hit traffic, worried about being late. Or maybe anxiety creeps in when a medical appointment looms on the horizon or a big credit card bill comes due.
The same life events might not produce the same anxious feelings in everyone. Different people react to different events in different ways. Usually, the event passes, the anxious feeling subsides and people are free to go about their days.
But what if that feeling lingers? What if it grows and begins to interfere with simple life tasks such as going to work or attending family gatherings? What if it begins to affect your physical health and well-being?
What if anxiety, in extreme circumstances, begins to control every aspect of your life?
For parents who have children who are dealing with anxiety, these are questions they must consider when deciding whether their child’s simple worry turns into a problem that they need an expert’s help to address. Anxiety disorders are growing in children and, according to the nonprofit organization Child Mind Institute, it is the largest psychiatric disorder in youth, outranking attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder.
In this edition of Valley Parents, we’ve chosen to focus on anxiety, in light of the growing number of children who suffer from it, and to focus on what parents, educators and health care providers can do to help.
We begin this edition with a Q&A Valley Parents correspondent Jaimie Seaton conducted with Sarah Stearns, a pediatric psychologist who treats children with anxiety disorders. Stearns explains the role of trauma in anxiety, the physical symptoms and treatment options. She advises that parents, while helping their children with anxiety disorders, should make sure they have a support system as well.
“Learning how to relax is one of the most important skills that kids can have,” Stearns told Seaton.
The issue is something that schools have taken notice of as well. At Canaan Elementary School, educators are working with children to teach them how to self-soothe. “Sometimes it’s self-talk, telling themselves they can do something,” Amy Reiter, a special education behavioral coach, told Seaton.
One form of treatment is exposure therapy, which purposely puts children in anxious situations so that they learn how to overcome them. Given the right tools, children can learn to manage their anxiety.
The last story of the edition is a first-person account from a young woman whose struggles with anxiety began in her youth. Penelope Heller shares what that experience was like and the work she did to overcome — and learn to live — with it.
Anxiety is an unfortunate fact of life. It’s hard to see children consumed by it. But they are far from alone in their struggles and there is help available.
Liz Sauchelli can be reached at esauchelli@vnews.com or 603-727-3221.
