Signs your child is suffering from anxiety
Ever wondered if your child’s behavior was more than them just having a hard time or being “naughty”? I have learned more than I care to about anxiety over the years and one of the biggest things I have learned is that anxiety can look very different from one child to the next. Anxiety is something I suffered from every since I was a child and now, unfortunately, both of my boys also suffer greatly from anxiety. While there can be a common thread among children that have anxiety, there are also many differences. Some signs your child is suffer from anxiety are more obvious than others. Here are a few ways to recognize if your child might be suffering from anxiety:
Aggressive Behavior
With anxiety, your body and mind will be in the “fight or flight” mode way more than it should be. In reality, one should only be in “fight or flight” mode when you are believed to be in danger. For most people with anxiety, that fight or flight response is triggered when there is no actual danger. For one of my boys, when his anxiety is triggered he commonly responds with “fight” and not “flight”. Having him want to fight every time he feels anxious creates many aggressive outbursts from him. He will become combative and start hitting, screaming, and kicking if he at all feels unsure about what is going on around him. It might be the simple task of telling him that we need to get dressed to go to school that would cause a full on war. I have had to hold his arms down many times to keep him from slugging me over and over. Sure, this sounds like I could have a kid with no emotions and that has aggression issues. Like any parent, I jumped to thinking something was terribly wrong and what did I do wrong for my child to react in such a violent way?! Was I being to relaxed on parenting him? Did he believe that he was in charge of me and could create the rules of the house? After too much time believing my little guy was just being naughty and testing boundaries, I would start seeing the fear that would creep in his eyes when he would have these angry outbursts. It was not that he was trying to be aggressive, he just lost all logic on how to behave properly once his anxiety kicked in. So simple things like asking him to get dressed for school that would cause him to fly into a fit of rage, was not so much about fighting me to just prove a point, it was about him feeling anxious about needing to go to school. He would much rather be staying in the safety of his own home so into “fight” mode he went as soon as those nasty anxiety feelings crept in about leaving home. Many things that will trigger an angry/fight response in my child is when he is overtired, routine is changed, is hungry, and doing anything that is new. There have been many times I have had questionable glares come my way when I try and take my boys to do something “new and different” and one, if not both, my boys are just slugging me and screaming because doing new things makes them anxious.
The need for control
Control is very important for anyone that is suffering from anxiety. The way a child might be looking for control may not be as obvious as an adult with anxiety looks for control. Maybe your child keeps asking for a million different toys before you leave the house, maybe they insist that they need to have the blue cup every day, maybe they are crying because they didn’t have a 2 minute warning it was time to leave. These I am sure are all behaviors that parents have seen in their young child at any given moment, however, the difference for kids with anxiety is the frequency and and intensity of these behaviors. This means for my kids, they will not let things go. They will hang on to whatever idea they have on how things should be and not let go of it until it is done exactly how they think it should be. It is exhausting. I have learned that by giving them two choices has been the biggest help for helping reduce anxiety and along with giving them the feeling of control. Granted, most times one of the choices is not a desirable choice, the choice is still theirs to make.
Being Defiant
When one of my little guys starts losing control due to his anxiety taking over, he has the mindset that no one else can tell him what to do, even if it is something he wants to do. For example, he will start whining and crying that he wants to snuggle and when I go to snuggle with him he will scream that he doesn’t want to snuggle. Once I walk away from him, he will get upset because he wants to snuggle again and this cycle could go on for hours. After I usually give him about two tries to stop getting mad at me for doing what he is asking, I ignore him and then he goes crazy because he still really wants a good snuggle. The problem is, is that he feels like he has lost control and wants that human contact of snuggling to calm him down. However, he is so stuck in his fight or flight response that he just can’t give in to snuggling and thinks he is controlling the situation by being defiant. Over time, he has learned that he doesn’t get much out of doing things this way but stubbornness is also a huge part of his personality so there is that to deal with as well!
Fleeing
It took me awhile to see this one as a sign of anxiety in my kids (which is crazy since I totally understood the “fight or flight” response for anxiety). I thought them taking off was their strong need to explore (which I am sure this also a factor) but after awhile I noticed a pattern of when they were most likely a flight risk. They were most likely to take off when we were on our way to do things they were unsure about. Not only would they both speed off in two opposite directions, they would do it with smiles on their faces. The smiles made me think they thought running away was just a fun game of chase but later on a I realized, just because they had a smile on their face didn’t mean they weren’t anxious. What they wanted was out of the current situation and fleeing seemed like the best choice. One of my boys is way worse about fleeing and basically it is his “go to” when anxiety kicks in for him.
Hyper Activity
There are times when anxiety kicks in for my boys and they will suddenly decide they need to get into everything! It’s almost as if they do ALL THE THINGS they won’t have to deal with the fact that they are anxious. There are times when we have gatherings over at our house and they will get overwhelmed and decide that is a good idea to run all over the house and start going through every single drawer and cabinet they can get their hands on. If we are at a store and they are overstimulated by their surroundings they will suddenly feel the need to try and grab and touch every single item within their reach. The hyper activity is a way to distract themselves from dealing with their anxiety and those unpleasant feelings.
A lot of times what looks like “naughty” behavior is actually just anxiety in disguise. If you can start recognizing your child is actually suffering from anxiety, hopefully you will start seeing ways to help them through their distress and lessen their anxiety over time.
Does your child suffer from anxiety? If so, what behaviors do you see in them when they are anxious?