Tamar E. Chansky lists some red flags for anxiety in a child in her insightful book, "Freeing Your Child: Powerful, Practical Solutions to Overcome Your Child's Fears, Worries, and Phobias":
1. Demonstrates excessive distress out of proportion to the situation: crying, physical symptoms, sadness, anger, frustration, hopelessness, embarrassment
2. Easily distressed, agitated, or angry when in a stressful situation
3. Repetitive reassurance questions, "what if" concerns, inconsolable, won't respond to logical arguments
4. Headaches, stomachaches, regularly too sick to go to school
5. Anticipatory anxiety, worrying hours, days, weeks ahead
6. Disruptions of sleep with difficulty falling asleep, frequent nightmares
7. Perfectionism, very high standards by which nothing is good enough
8. Overly responsible, excessive concern that others are upset with him or her, unnecessary apologizing
9. Demonstrates excessive avoidance: refuses to participate in expected activities, refuses to attend school
10. Disruption of child or family functioning, difficulty with going to school, to a friends' houses, religious activities, family gatherings, on errands, on vacations
11. Excessive time spent consoling child about distress with ordinary situations, excessive time coaxing child to perform normal activities--homework, hygiene, meals
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This describes my now 42 year-old brother his entire life. He is still almost crippled in terms of how narrowly he has drawn the boundaries of his life in order to avoid his anxiety. I wish we could have found ways back then to help him so that it would have not gotten worse.
Actually, you only need to watch for one flag: A noticeable, sudden, significant change in your child's personality.
Of course, this assumes you know your child well enough to spot such a change.
PLease, send me the wonderful brief article you wrote on "8 Ways to Affair Proof your Marriage" that was posted on Yahoo.com this morning, but I was not able to print out for my husband to read. It was very helpful and they moved it off their site and I can't find it. My e-mail only has one "r" in it.
Thank You,
Debra Babarsky
I couldn't agree more with the first commenter. Our son had terrible school anxiety when he attended a private school for a year when we moved to a new city. The school (Episcopal...ha!!!) acted as if he was being disobedient when he had panic attacks in the car in the mornings about going to school...he would sob and apologize. He was not being disobedient, was just terrified of his teacher (this was only second grade).
The only thing that worked was changing schools.
i'm still helping her though the pain of losing her father ..
no matter what i did i can't make it better for her ...so we moved
to the other side of the country ...and to my great joy she is doing so much better ...so yes sometimes we just need to ask for help and let God lead the way .......mother of a nine girl
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