Anxiety in Kids and Teens: What To Watch For

Find resources and more about the expert below.

What Is Normal Anxiety?

First of all, it’s important to know that anxiety is a normal emotion that we all experience.

There’s a reason why we’ve evolved over millions of years to still have anxiety. Anxiety helps us to look both ways when we cross the street. It helps us to study for a test. It helps us when we’re on the soccer field, paying attention in the moment.

Anxiety helps us prepare for goals. It helps to keep us safe. “I like to think of anxiety as a small fire alarm in our brain, and it’s meant to go off when there’s danger, when there’s something we need to prepare for, when there’s a goal we need to motivate for,” says Stark.

When Is Anxiety Less Helpful?

Sometimes the fire alarm in our brain goes off—because of past experiences or anxiety sensitivity—when we’re making toast, metaphorically. Sometimes the alarm goes off when there’s not a major danger.

Here are some examples of this:

• You’re sitting down to take a test and you start to feel panicky. Your breathing starts increasing. It feels hard to even focus on the moment.
• You’re on the soccer field and you feel paralyzed by indecision, it feels hard to move toward the ball. You feel scared and think: “I don’t know what to do, everyone’s going to judge me.”

In these moments, anxiety starts to get to a level that’s not helpful.

“When I’m working with kids and teens at the clinic,” Stark shares, “I tend to look for anxiety that is distressing, that feels bigger than the moment calls for, is interfering in daily life, and is getting in the way with their goals.”

For most people, anxiety latches onto the things that we care about most. If you care a lot about academics, academic curiosity, and doing well in school, you might spend hours worrying over schoolwork. Anxiety might pull away the joy and the curiosity of learning.

If you’re someone who cares a lot about relationships, or what other people think about you, then social connections or social anxiety might make you so afraid of judgment that it feels paralyzing or hard to make decisions for yourself.

These are the moments when anxiety gets to a more unhelpful level and gets in the way of what we want to do.

3 Ways Adults Can Interact / Intervene With Anxiety

Stark explains that there are three main things that can be helpful, both for mild levels of anxiety and more severe levels of anxiety.

1. Validation

Validation is a word we hear a lot in pop culture. A lot of people aren’t sure what validation means. Does this mean I let my kid do whatever they want when they’re anxious or that I’m not allowed to push them when they’re anxious?

Validation is communicating that someone’s emotion makes sense in the moment. It can feel scary to do this sometimes, like it might intensify the emotion.

What we know about validation is it actually does the opposite. It provides relief and makes people feel better.

For example, it’s the first day of school, and your child comes to you and says, “I’m so anxious, I’m nervous about the other kids and the teachers,” and so on. It can be tempting to do the opposite of validation and jump in and minimize or dismiss the anxiety.

A parent might say something like, “Don’t be anxious, it’s going to be great, don’t worry about it. It’s going to be a great first day.”

And even though this is well-intended, it tends to communicate, “You shouldn’t be feeling anxious right now. Other people aren’t feeling anxious, and there’s something wrong if you don’t have a great day.”

This can intensify anxiety in the moment and create secondary emotions like shame or guilt over feeling this way.

It can feel counterintuitive, but validation in this example would be saying something like, “It makes total sense you feel anxious, it’s the first day of school, of course you feel anxious.” Or, “I remember feeling anxious on the first day of school, so sharing that emotion with me makes sense. It makes sense why you’re feeling that, given the situation.”

2. Lean Into Brave Behavior

It can be tempting when kids are feeling anxious to try to pull away whatever it is that’s making them feel anxious. And in the short term, that can feel really helpful.

In the long term, this tends to communicate that kids can’t handle that anxiety-provoking situation. It can pull them away from their goals.

We want to reinforce and praise anytime a child does anything that involves brave behavior, such as moving toward a thing that makes them anxious but is actually safe.

For example, if a kid is afraid of going to a birthday party because they don’t know all the other kids there, a parent might tell the child, “Could you go and talk to one person that you know there that you feel closer to?”

Giving them some praise for doing this, and then maybe stepping out of the room and giving them some more time there at the birthday party, is a way of pushing brave behavior in a step-by-step way and reinforcing it.

3. Normalizing Anxiety

“I think oftentimes in our culture, we don’t normalize that it is completely typical to feel emotions like anxiety, shame, sadness. These are a part of life,” says Stark. “I like to give examples from my own life that are developmentally appropriate and ways that I’ve coped with anxiety.”

“The other day, I was driving, and I noticed there was a spider crawling on the roof of my car above my head, and I am very afraid of spiders. So, I had to keep on driving, I had to stay calm, and wait until the next red light when I could flick the spider out the window.”

Stark explains that this is a great example of sharing—in a developmentally appropriate way—an instance of a time a parent felt anxious, a time a teacher felt anxious, and being able to show off that brave behavior and normalizing anxiety by showing that we all feel this way.

What Not To Do

There’s nothing wrong or scary abut feeling anxiety.

Stark points out a few things that can inadvertently increase anxiety or are unhelpful when a child is feeling anxious. “Minimizing or dismissing anxiety, saying things like, ‘Don’t feel anxious, it’s not a big deal, you shouldn’t feel this way in the moment.’ And additionally, reacting in a big emotional way to anxiety or showing your own anxiety in the moment.”

Going back to that first-day-of-school example, if a child comes up to you and says, “I’m so nervous about the first day of school,” it’s unhelpful to say to them something like, “Oh no, should we call the teachers? Is this going to be too much for you? I feel nervous about this.”

Instead, this reaction reinforces this idea that anxiety is in some way dangerous, or there’s something scary about this.

Key Takeaway Points

In summary, anxiety is normal. It is something we all feel. It tends to become more challenging if it is interfering in our life, distressing, and pulling us away from our goals.

Validation, normalizing anxiety, and reinforcing brave behavior can be really helpful in the moment.