Anxiety disorders can be prevented in children of adults who are suffering from the disorder, as stated in a new study. According to the researchers, children of adults with anxiety disorders are at greater risk of having the same disorder, but with family therapy, the risk can be lowered.
The study and the results were published in the American Journal of Psychiatry.
Psychologist Golda S. Ginsburg and her team from Johns Hopkins University studied 136 families with at least one parent having an anxiety disorder and at least one child between 6 to 13 years old without an anxiety disorder. Seventy families were assigned to a family-based intervention group and the remaining 66 families were assigned to a control group.
Findings showed that family-based therapy helped in preventing the development of anxiety disorders in children. Only 9 percent of the participating children in the family-based therapy group developed anxiety a year later, which was low compared to the 31% of children in the control group who received no therapy at all.
Children express anxiety in different ways due to different causes, which then hinder performance of daily tasks like self care, sleeping, socializing and playing. Some of these anxious behaviors may have been learned by following their anxious parents.
Dealing with anxious children is difficult, but even more so when one of the parents is struggling with the disorder themselves. Family therapy helps these anxious patients by teaching them to identify anxiety symptoms, apply problem-solving techniques and exercise safe exposures to what caused the anxiety.
"The whole idea here is to teach parents to recognize the signs of anxiety in their kids, and then teach the parents things they can do to reduce it," Ginsburg said.
"Anxiety and fear are protective and adaptive," added Ginsburg. "But in anxious kids they may not be, because these children have thoughts about danger and threat when there really isn't one."
"We taught the kids how to identify scary thoughts, and how to change them," explained Ginsburg. In this form of behavioral therapy, the children are taught to identify what makes them anxious, then are encouraged to test whether these thoughts can actually come true. Once the children become aware that their fears are unfounded, they become more confident and have lowered anxiety levels.
Ginsburg believes in the possibility that regular checkups for families with anxiety and other mental disorders are most helpful. She is also thinking of proposing the importance of these services to health insurers to see if family-based intervention can lower health care costs.
"I'd say we need to change our model of mental health to a checkup method," Ginsburg says. "Like going to the dentist every six months."
Photo: Stuart Richards | Flickr
