When you look at my five year old, you see a normal little boy with scraped knees, dirty hands, and a cheesy smile. You’d never guess that he suffers from lives with severe anxiety, but he does. WE do.
For years we have dealt with his “nervous habits”. Biting his nails, clearing his throat, clinging to our leg when we would go out in public. Things you can easily shrug off as normal childhood behavior. Then he went to Kindergarten and his behavior changed. He started complaining daily of headaches, stomachaches, and leg pain. He would take over an hour to fall asleep at night. We told him he was fine, there was nothing wrong with him. He would wake in the night, climb in our bed, and tell us he had a bad dream. Dreams of things that would frighten anyone (tornadoes, sharks, storms, war, etc.) He told us his “head wouldn't leave him alone”. He acted out, and he would do things that were socially inappropriate. He became mean and hateful, hitting us and his baby brother, throwing things, etc. We disciplined him, took away toys, privileges, you name it. But nothing affected him.
After one semester of school, we reached out to his physician thinking he had ADHD. Imagine our surprise when the physician said he had severe childhood anxiety. To put it into perspective, on the scoring of his anxiety questionnaire, a score that would indicate anxiety would be 25….Carson’s score was 54….Fifty. Four. My stomach sank when I heard those words from his doctor. He was started on medication (“off label use”) and we slowly saw improvement. Once he was able to sleep and his head was clear, he slowly became our sweet little boy again. However, the improvement wasn't until after he had already damaged social relationships, and after we had been labeled as “bad parents” by other parents in our son’s school.
So why am I telling you all this? So that you can know the signs of anxiety and maybe be more understanding of other parents and their child’s behavior, or even of your own child’s behavior. While worrying is normal to a degree, sometimes it is more than just worrying.
Here are some red flags that may indicate your child needs to be evaluated.
1) Easily agitated or overly stressed in a normally stressful situation. Perhaps it’s a performance at school and they are stressed over the need to be perfect, so they act out with aggression and agitation toward others. Or they act out by trying to be funny to ease the attention on themselves.
2) Recurrent sleep disturbances. Sleep deprivation can cause children to act irrationally, be hateful, overly emotional. They may wake in the middle of the night, have nightmares, have difficulty falling asleep, or have a fear of sleeping alone.
3) Irrational fears of “something bad” happening or the “what ifs”. They may question repeatedly what would happen if a tornado came, or the building caught on fire, or if the car ran off the road. Even though you just told them yesterday, or even today, that these things were highly unlikely, they still question you about it.
4) Physical symptoms. Recurrent complaint of headaches, muscle aches, abdominal pain, or restlessness are just some of the physical symptoms. Anxiety can become so overbearing that your child actually does feel pain when there’s no logical reason or physical injury to cause it.
5) Perfectionism. They must have everything perfect or they have to start over. They can’t be interrupted from a task to move on to something else until the first task is completed. They are overly critical of everything they do.
If your child has any of the above symptoms, perhaps you should consider talking with your child’s physician about him or her. Don’t assume that a child acting up is because of a bad parent or a bratty child. There may be more to it that you don’t know. After all, looking at my son, you would think he’s a normal little boy. You’d never guess that his behavior problems are simply him trying to make himself feel comfortable in an uncomfortable situation.
