The Anxious Child
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You may be trying to decide if your child has separation anxiety or you may have had a diagnosis from a professional. The purpose of this article is to help parents understand anxiety and begin the process of overcoming anxiety. Is your child crying excessively the day before school or pre-school and unable to go to sleep? Do they cling on to you any time they sense you are leaving their side? Is separating from your child heartbreaking and stressful for both mother and child? For some children anxiety will bring up feelings of fear, sadness, nausea, racing heart and sweating. Some children will experience a temporary loss of hearing and not be able to hear as well or will not be able to speak or move. Often these children will start to worry about the next day as early as dinner time and escalate towards bedtime. Parents can be left to feel unable to help and even feel bewildered as to what is going on.
We should first take a look what is going on in the brain of an anxious child. The brain has an already pre-programmed reaction in case you are in danger. This is referred to as the fight or flight effect. The brain triggers this program off itself and ends the program itself.
You cannot turn on and off this alarm yourself only the brain can do that. For some people this alarm goes off when there is no danger. The overwhelming feelings come and go in waves on and off. One technique used to overcome anxiety is systematic desensitization, a behavioral therapy, developed by a South African Psychiatrist, Joseph Wolpe. This technique helps the brain to desensitize to its environment slowly. The brain automatically adjusts to new environments but when overwhelmed needs a more systematic approach. Now that we know what is going on in the brain, all activities that make a child anxious must be broken down into baby steps. For example, a much more gradual entry for school would be used. Such as the child can enter the classroom for ten minutes while
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