Do you remember all the times in school when you were seconds or even minutes away from taking a big test or giving a presentation in front of all of your friends? What about the times you had to speak to your parents or your friends about an important issue in your life? More specifically, do you remember how you felt before giving that big speech? Or how you felt before having that serious talk with your
parents? How did you feel talking about an issue with friends? If you were anything like me, you remember feeling short of breath, dizzy, or even overwhelmed. Even if you weren’t like me you might’ve felt nervous or ill in some way. Did anyone understand what you were going through or try to to understand these feelings? Were you able to talk to someone you trust about it? Anxiety is a silent enemy that you never see coming. It’s everywhere. Anxiety presents itself in many different sources and in many different forms in society.
School, family, or even friends are prominent sources of anxiety in every person’s life. Obviously, skipping school is not an option and you can’t avoid family and friends forever, so that leaves you stuck. The more I thought about the idea of being stuck with the largest sources of anxiety, I wondered if you could use these sources of anxiety as relief as well. What ways could family, school, and friends help alleviate anxiety? This topic presents a lively debate between psychologists and community leaders about how to contribute positively to reducing anxiety present in society. While many of these people would believe that family, school, and friends are the main sources of anxiety, others believe that while they can be the problem, they can also provide a solution. There are many people in the world that have helped find different strategies that could lead to alleviating anxiety.
While talking helps and allows teens to feel understood and supported, there are also instances where too much support can do more harm than good to a child’s anxiety. In a medically reviewed article by Dr. Caroline Buzanko, a licensed psychologist, mentions how a parents first instinct when seeing their child upset or afraid is to help and protect them. By not allowing them to face their fear by acting as a safety net parents could be stopping their kids from overcoming it. When a child is not allowed to overcome their anxiety, it can often start to negatively affect the entire family. Accommodating could lead to missing out on experiences as a family or even a married couple. Dr. Buzanko says “While, at the moment, it may feel easier to accommodate the child, in the long run, accommodation fuels the anxiety disorder.”. The more the anxiety builds the harder it will be to relieve as the child grows up. It also causes further negative effects for everyone in the family. Members of the family run the risk of missing important milestones and events by accommodating a child’s anxiety stressor.
While the problem solving starts at home, it continues and thrives throughout the school system. Even though it provides stress through tests and assignments, it also provides opportunity for self-expression and empowerment. One school implemented a kid’s empowerment program in which kids promoted their well-being in order to observe the effects on their social, emotional, and coping skills. The program consisted of 102 students participating in a kid’s empowerment program that lasted 12 sessions and recording data based on their social, emotional, and coping skills along with the amount of attended sessions. The research found that “children with greater internalizing problems appeared to benefit most from the program.”, which further revealed that schools have the ability to allow for students to work through their issues. Empowering these kids and teens to prioritize their own well being is essential in both school and home settings. It’s one thing knowing things are not ok, but allowing kids and teens to prioritize their wellbeing and allowing them to fix it is a new thing. Sometimes generational gaps between parents and their kids affect the availability of these new things and other times there is just an overall negative stigma attached to it. Which could refer back to the findings of Dr. Price-Mitchell and how she described how people should converse in relationships. To eliminate this stigma, we must be supportive, open, and willing.
Schools provide a supportive and helpful environment for kids to relieve their anxiety, but the community surrounding these kids also provides an environment that could be healthy for relief. It is just as important to consider the environment around a child and how it could help work through a kid’s anxiety. A journalist writes about how a California Outpatient facility for teens with significant anxiety and depression earned accreditation that allowed for school credit to be earned in their facilities through learning coping skills to deal with anxiety. The facility uses the ASPIRE program that builds interpersonal relationships through educational and skill groups, and family meetings to teach these coping skills. This strategy allows for families to show support in meetings and let the individual know that it will be better outside of the facility. Allowing them to connect with schools and regain some semblance of a normal life, establishes trust within the facility and comfort from the world they will soon be returning to. It is good for those at risk of depression and anxiety to learn to cope with their anxiety and re-enter the real world.
Places in the real world have also provided forms of anxiety relief that helps parents understand and help their kids with anxiety or depression. In Boston Massachusetts, Dr. Nicolas D. Mian from the department of psychology at Boston University has conducted a study with his colleagues that suggested selective preventative programs might help parents of children with anxiety. The study consisted of grouping the parents into groups of eight through preferences based on surveys they filled out. Then, providing those groups with a 30-minute PowerPoint presentation about the emotional development of children and then allowing the parents to share their experiences and ask questions. The study found that many of the parents agreed they “‘…would recommend this group to a friend relative; the information presented at this group was useful; I would like to attend more meetings.’”. Having the parents attend more meetings allow them to see other parents experiencing the same things that they are and help each other learn. Once parents learn how to help their children through their anxiety, the sooner their anxiety will alleviate.
The presence of anxiety relieving programs is necessary in the world we live in today. According to psychologists, in recent years anxiety and depression have become a bigger concern than bullying in schools and communities. Unfortunately, anxiety in teens and adolescents is growing more prevalent in every new generation. There are so many sources of anxiety that we encounter every day, that we can’t find a way to avoid it. If we can’t avoid it, the next best thing is to learn to handle it in healthy ways. That process starts with turning what we see as anxiety producing institutions to institutions, we use to handle that anxiety. As a society, we have certainly started to explore this process, but there is so much more we could be doing. Establishing trust with a child with anxiety is essential to furthering our understanding of anxiety in children and teens. Educating parents, supporting children in schools, and communicating have the potential to do amazing things for people with anxiety, but that is just the beginning. We need to take the strategies we have and implement them in more places across the map. It is our job as people of today to create a better and healthier world for the people of tomorrow.
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