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 In general, "anxiety and fear are protective” sensations, but that
might not be true for anxious kids, “because these children have
thoughts about danger and threat when there really isn't one," said
lead author Golda S. Ginsburg of the University of Connecticut
Health Center in West Hartford in a press release.
Ginsburg and her coauthors studied 136 families with at least one
parent with an anxiety disorder and at least one child between the
ages of six and 13 who did not meet the criteria for anxiety.
The parents didn’t have any other psychiatric conditions, like
substance abuse, for example.
The families were divided into two groups, 70 in the Coping and
Promoting Strength Program and 66 in a comparison group.
The “promoting strength” group received eight weekly one-hour
sessions with trained therapists – the first two sessions between a
therapist and parents alone and then six more sessions with any
interested family members. Therapists targeted modifiable parent and
child risk factors, like parental modeling of controlling behavior
or overprotection. They taught parents and families how to identify
the signs of anxiety and how to reduce it by changing the way
parents thought about stressful triggers.
"We taught the kids how to identify scary thoughts, and how to
change them," Ginsburg said in the statement.
They also taught parents to increase their child’s autonomy and
independence.
Those in the comparison group received a 36-page pamphlet on anxiety
disorders and their treatments, but no therapy sessions.
One year after the study began, 31 percent of children in the
comparison group had developed an anxiety disorder, compared to five
percent in the therapy group, the researchers reported in the
American Journal of Psychiatry.
Many factors determine whether or not a child develops anxiety,
including genes and environment, Ginsburg told Reuters Health by
email.
Severe anxiety is the most common psychiatric disorder for children
and adults, she said.
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At any given time, about 5 percent of children meet the criteria for
an anxiety disorder, according to Jennie Hudson, an emotional health
researcher at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia who was not
part of the new study.
“In addition to the heritability, children learn by watching others
including their parents,” Hudson told Reuters Health by email.
If a parent is anxious, then their activities are likely to be more
restricted – those with social anxiety may attend fewer parties or
go out less, those with agoraphobia might be less exposed to travel,
she said.
“This provides the child with fewer opportunities to learn different
information about new situations and about their own ability to cope
with these situations,” she said.
This therapy program was offered free of charge as part of the
study. The researchers are now doing a long term follow-up study of
these kids and will be asking families how much they would pay for
it Ginsburg said.
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/1JAjnCF The American Journal of Psychiatry,
online September 25, 2015
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