Why is there so much anxiety in kids?

[JudesBiggestFan]

Spoke to a family member earlier who is a teaching assistant.
Said the number of kids off with anxiety at her high school is phenomenal. Anecdotally I know of so so many severe issues....panic attacks, school refusal etc. 'Because Covid' seems to be the answer..along with why there is so much bullying/poor behaviour in schools. Is this why or is there more to it?
My own three boys seem fine thus far, but as I'm an emergency services worker, they only missed a really minimal amount of school.
But the poor behaviour of others does impact on the classroom environment/teacher stress so still has an effect on them.
So what is the reason? And what can be done? School days are supposed to be happy and carefree and it just feels like kids are just so sad.

It really isn’t and it is this kind of view which sets mental health back

plus it is not only a rise for the young. The person most likely is an over 60 women

From working with a slightly different age group, (preschoolers) I can safely say that yes, lockdowns and covid still have a big impact. The new covid cohorts are unlike anything I've ever looked after in 15 years of childcare, the lack of socialisation, excess in screens (no judgement, I threw the telly on just as often!), limited communication while parents were juggling home working AND home schooling is spilling out into lack of social skills, emotional regulation, severe speech delays, early help missed and it is hard.

I have an older one who had just completed reception, and after 2 years on and off of lockdown went into a very very hard year 3 where they absolutely battered them to try and get them to where they would have been if there hadn't been lockdown. There were not many allowances for very long to account for their world being so small to then being thrown back to normality on and off for that long. And now we have teachers off with covid and mine worry it's going to go back to how it was. I'm not surprised there's a lot more anxiety after a period of uncertainty and upheaval. I don't think people are jumping on the bandwagon of mental health, I think people are just more aware and much more empathetic towards children who are struggling with their mental health.

My Dd is suffering terribly with anxiety , OCD and is now self harming. We've been waiting 16 months for psychiatric help.

This is not our fault as parents.

She suddenly became very sick with a chronic illness just before the second lockdown. Going back to school after three months of illness and lockdown triggered anxiety and OCD. She didn't trust her body not to let her down and she feared being teased because of the symptoms of her illness being visible and the fact that steroids had giver her "moon face"

There is no help. We tried counselling but she got worse. She stopped taking medication and made herself ill again. We were referred for help but the waiting list is years. Her mental health has declined further but it still doesn't move her up the waiting list.

We know have to hide all sharp objects and life is basically hell for us as a family. She will leave school with no GCSEs next year because she just can't function. She goes to school everyday but she doesn't engage or do homework.

Don't forget we are also managing and helping her cope with the treatment for her physical health issues at the same time as dealing with her mental health.

But yeah I guess it's all our fault for being stress and she just needs to get over herself.

I definitely think the fear of being filmed/having pictures taken all the time at school and in public is a big thing.

Up until very recently at my sons school they were encouraged to use their phones for looking stuff up, taking pictures of the board, listening to music whilst doing art etc.

But they also: filmed teachers and posted offensive videos of them on social media, used phones to arrange to meet their friends in the toilet to vape, played Indian music when they had an Asian supply teacher, hid their phone behind their textbooks when they're meant to be reading.

There's recently been a stricter stance where phones must be in bags/coats at all times but let's face it..... kids are clever.

If something silly happened to you at school 30 years ago, people might laugh for a few days then forget about it, bullying words were written on a toilet wall or said to your face.

Now cameras are following kids around 24/7.

And stop with the parent blaming.

The majority of the time it's not anything to do with the parents.

And with regards to lockdown impact it differs depending on the child.

DD hated the school closure. She struggled with home learning and couldn't keep up when schools re opened. Her confidence was on the floor and she's never recovered and I don't think ever will now she has illness and mental health issues to deal with.

DS absolutely thrived during lockdown. The best time of his life he say's. I actually think it saved him as he was struggling a bit before the pandemic and he needed the freedom to find himself. His grades dipped a bit because of home learning but he caught up quickly once he started back at school and got mainly 8's and 9's in his GCSEs last summer.

From working with a slightly different age group, (preschoolers) I can safely say that yes, lockdowns and covid still have a big impact. The new covid cohorts are unlike anything I've ever looked after in 15 years of childcare, the lack of socialisation, excess in screens (no judgement, I threw the telly on just as often!), limited communication while parents were juggling home working AND home schooling is spilling out into lack of social skills, emotional regulation, severe speech delays, early help missed and it is hard.

This fits with what I've heard from relatives working in the sector. And it makes sense. Of course removing the normal props of life was going to have an impact.

So sorry to hear this. It must be incredibly stressful for your family.

@blackheartsgirl you're taking what people are saying personally. They are not talking about situations like yours but about a general state that seems to have developed with lots of children having self-diagnosed 'anxiety'. That does not mean that your children do not genuinely suffer with anxiety but that the word is becoming devalued because it is applied too quickly to too many children, which runs the risk of undermining the genuine anxiety that DC like yours are struggling with.

I think people underestimate how much the pandemic will have impacted many.

Yes people retrospectively judging their parents’ parenting in the 60s-90s and deciding their parents were ‘abusive’ is definitely a thing. And hence begins the cycle of introspection, deciding their entire life has been deeply difficult/unfair, and sort of painting themselves as a tortured martyr in a film of their own life.

My mum is like this - she regularly smacked us as kids, typical 80s/90s parenting, didn’t pay too much attention to our ‘emotional needs’ but then she had 5 kids under the age of 10 and we didn’t have much money.

She then turned 45ish and the menopause and introspection began. She started a relationship with somebody who basically filled her head with rubbish about everyone in her life being a toxic narc, how hard done by she was/is, how her entire life she’s been people pleasing and deserves to be ‘set free’. She lapped it all up, fell out with everyone in her family and not long after this new partner began cock lodging and beating her up 🤔 mum excused all of it by saying his MH was bad! They split up after 10 years but the damage is done, I haven’t seen her for a long time.

It’s somewhat ironic that she still claims we drove them apart, that her parents were cruel to her (the same ones that picked up the pieces after the domestic violence) and that everything wrong in her life is down to other people (us)

All this toxic ‘mental health chat’ and obsession with inflating feelings is a spectacular own goal for some people.

Agree with this. Normal human emotional responses to unpleasant situations have been pathologised, yes they're uncomfortable and sometimes distressing but they're not all illness or a condition. We live in an era of hyper, helicopter risk averse parenting which is trickling down to our children. Camhs is deluged by inappropriate referrals often social/systemic in nature which means that those families with serious and pervasive difficulties can't access a service. Experienced professionals are leaving camhs/teaching and social work because it's unbearable to work in them.

The inadequacy of CAMHS cannot be explained by inappropriate referrals.

"it's good to talk" has now become detrimental. It's not good to have endless problem saturated conversations and like other posters have mentioned introspection. We've all become ridiculously self focussed. And despite popular Opinion therapy/counseling is not a catch all solution and can actually be damaging/make things worse. Lifestyle changes and building up supportive relationships and connections is often far more effective!

True

I agree @Courgeon

Instagram (and I don’t mean MH specific accounts) is FULL of posts of ‘thought I would share what it’s like behind the photos’, pictures of crying people with long emotional posts about ‘breaking the stigma’, posts by mums about ‘mental health as a mum of toddlers’ and how hard it is, people announcing their ‘secret’ anxiety diagnosis etc

I want to say fuck off you’re ruining my MH with all this crap 🙄

I wish people would stop for a minute and understand what this means.

This is one aspect of the modern world which does not affect adults in anywhere near the same way as it affects children.

Imagine how anxious you would feel if every minute of every day, all your work colleagues were taking pictures and filming you so that they could catch you looking stupid or could edit those photos into something cruel.

Imagine every move you made around your office or place of work was liable to be caught on camera and shared to everyone in the office for laughs.

Imagine things that you are conscious of (your weight, your skin, your hair, your cheap shoes falling apart etc…..) being a CONSTANT source of entertainment for group chats and public social media posts.

Imagine sitting down at your desk, and the whole office are pissing themselves laughing but you don’t know why. Eventually somebody shares with you with the 10 second porn clip that has used a photo of you with a weird expression on your face, and photoshopped it onto somebody performing a lap dance.

Imagine all the males in the office regularly published a list of ‘Year 9 Mingers’, and you had to wait to see if you were on it.

Do you think you would start to feel a bit anxious on a daily basis?

Helicopter parenting. There are loads of threads on MN where parents agonise over the tiniest disappointment or snub instead of teaching their child some resilience.

Oh fgs I’m not saying it’s all neurotic parenting 🙄. It is for many though sorry but it is.

im going to take it personally when someone just says shit parenting in response to the question why are kids more anxious these days.

I also think that it is all too easy to blame parents for the anxiety in children’s lives whether or not they’ve suffered trauma etc. and I agree with pps that every aspect of our teens lives are on social media. I cannot begin to imagine what effect that has on children’s mental health.

I love getting out in nature and for walks, I think it’s good for the mind, I had so much resistance from my dc at first not because they were cold and didn’t want to get muddy but because they were scared that someone they knew from school would see them, take a picture and it would go round school and they didn’t want to be seen as boring and sad.

that’s a shame

This.

Kids didn't know what anxiety or depression was nor had really heard about it when I was at school. And this was only 15 years ago!

It's forced through social media parents etc. Everyone has something these days/everything has to have a label and it is ridiculously degrading and diminishing to people who have genuine issues.

I did see an article recently that said London (specifically) is one of the most hostile places to raise children. I dont think we are a very family friendly/community oriented place generally speaking.

Do you have any actual evidence for that?

You don’t need evidence for opinion and general chat on an Internet forum.

Social media has a big part to play I think.
Especially so called influencers. They paint a perfect almost impossible to achieve picture of their lives and too many too young kids think that that is a reflection of real life.
Some children are also following some very dodgy people on social media where the content is actually very dangerous for young impressionable minds.