Welcome to our Summer Blog Series examining the impact of anxiety disorders on church participation and spiritual development in kids. In today’s post, we’ll look at the different ways in which anxiety disorders manifest in kids.

Within our overarching category of anxiety disorders, a number of specific conditions have been described that are characterized by the context in which the child’s anxiety symptoms occur. These conditions are listed below:

Kids with Separation Anxiety Disorder experience excessive fear or distress when away from home or a significant attachment figure, usually a parent. Challenges for such kids may include leaving for school, sleeping alone, spending the night away from home, managing concerns about the health or well-being of parents or caregivers, staying with a babysitter when parents go out or playing alone upstairs or in the basement when a parent or sibling is not present in the room. They may voice a variety of physical complaints on Sunday night or following an extended vacation in anticipation of returning to school and are often frequent visitors of the school nurse.

Kids with a Specific Phobia experience fear of specific objects or situations that leads to avoidance of the object or situation, or great distress if the situation is endured. Common phobias for children might include insects, animals, car or air travel, amusement park rides, or a fear of doing something embarrassing after observing a similar incident with another child. An example of this would be the child who becomes fearful of eating lunch in the school cafeteria after witnessing another child vomit.

Kids with Generalized Anxiety Disorder experience chronic, excessive worry, much of the time, most every day in multiple areas of functioning. Such concerns often involve schoolwork, health, safety, natural disasters, storms, social interactions or world events. They experience at least one chronic physical symptom in association with their fears. Kids with generalized anxiety often exhibit excessive perfectionism and experience more distress than may be evident to parents or teachers.

Kids with Social Anxiety Disorder experience significant fear and distress around unfamiliar peers and in performance situations. They experience great discomfort with social scrutiny and are very fearful of embarrassing themselves in front of peers. Kids with social anxiety may have difficulty ordering food in a restaurant, using the telephone to call a friend or attending a party when they don’t know most of the kids who were invited. Teachers may complain that kids with social anxiety don’t participate enough in class, don’t ask questions or don’t seek out help when they need it. Kids with Selective Mutism persistently fail to speak, read aloud or sing in specific situations (e.g., school, church) despite speaking normally in other situations. They may whisper or communicate selectively with certain peers or teachers. Selective mutism is thought to represent a manifestation or subtype of social anxiety.

Kids with Panic Disorder experience brief, recurrent, unanticipated episodes of intense fear, and may subsequently avoid places or situations associated with the episodes (agoraphobia). Panic disorder is different from panic attacks that occur in response to a specific situation associated with another anxiety disorder, such as separation or social scrutiny. Kids with panic disorder may experience symptoms in classrooms or other places where they might experience difficulty leaving without drawing unwanted attention from others.

Kids with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) will experience recurrent, intrusive thoughts or compulsive, recurrent, repetitive behavior associated with significant mental distress. They may display excessive perfectionism, have difficulty making decisions when asked to choose from several alternatives, fear that they may be drawn to certain actions or behavior against their will, hoard useless items or materials or exhibit time-consuming rituals such as counting, checking, arranging or ordering items, grooming or washing. In school, kids with OCD may read assignments repetitively because of fears of overlooking important information, experience difficulty completing assignments or tests within the required time because of perfectionism or rewrite assignments because of minor errors in penmanship.

This week…we’ll look at signs church staff , volunteers and parents might observe in the child struggling with anxiety