Question
Is anxiety in children normal?
Answer
Anxiety is something that we often times discuss as being a problem or an issue that children face, but really, anxiety is normal. It's adaptive, it keeps us safe in a lot of different situations, and it's our body's way of telling us when we're in danger. There are many situations where children need to be attentive to danger and it's healthy that their bodies are giving them an indication that danger is around. When a strange person pulls up in a van next to a child, we want them to have some indication that this is not right. We want their bodies to react and we want them to react with fear and anxiety so that they run away and let an adult know. The problem is that sometimes anxiety causes our body to react to danger when there's not really danger there. A parent leaving a child at preschool or daycare in the morning is not a dangerous situation, and yet for some kids, their body and their brains are reacting as if there is a real danger. We consider it to be a problem when we talk about interference in the child's life, and for young children, or actually children of any age, interference really happens in three main areas of their life. The first area is a child’s daily functioning, which includes things like self-care, managing their emotions, and doing things around the house like being able to go to sleep on time, wake up on time, pick up after themselves, and eat properly. The second area is school or daycare, or any school-like activity. If there's interference that's happening there, then that can be a problem. Social interference is the third domain. If it's getting in the way of them interacting with peers in a developmentally-typical way, then that can certainly be an issue. The more of those areas of life that anxiety interferes with in a child, the more concern we have that maybe what we're dealing with is an anxiety disorder. Everybody has anxiety, kids, teens, and adults, but the more interference you get in your life, the more likely you are to be diagnosed with anxiety and the more likely you are to really need to intervene for that child.
There are developmentally appropriate fears for kids. At each stage in a child's life, there are certain kinds of fears or anxieties that we expect, they're sort of inborn. For infants, there's a fear of separation and a fear of strangers or novel faces. That typically occurs somewhere between six and 30 months and it peaks around one year of age. We expect that, and in fact, if kids don't have that fear of separation, sometimes that can be concerning because it's a developmentally-typical stage. However, outside of that one to two-year time span if children still continue experiencing separation anxiety, such as ages three, four, and five, then we might suspect that it was outside of what's developmentally typical or developmentally appropriate. For toddlers and preschoolers, things like the dark, big animals, imaginary creatures like monsters, witches, ghosts, and storms or weather-related disasters can be scary for those kids. Again, that's developmentally typical, we expect that at that age. If you had a kid who was a teenager and was still fearful of big animals or monsters, then that would be outside of the developmentally typical range.
This Ask the Expert is an edited excerpt from the course entitled Understanding and Supporting Children with Anxiety, by Aimee Kotrba, PhD.
