anxious kids

These days there are few more perennial sources of parental anxiety than the seemingly skyrocketing rates of anxiety among our kids. Every day another article flits across our social media feeds, warning us of a catastrophic rise in the number of anxious kids filling our schools, taxing the resources of parents and teachers alike. We look at our own child and wonder whether their hesitance over going to school or trying new foods is a harbinger of things to come.

“I first started working in schools in the late 1990s,” says Dr Jodi Richardson, an educator and coauthor of Anxious Kids, a manual for parents dealing with a child’s anxiety disorder. “Anxiety wasn’t on the radar back then. I didn’t even know it existed. Now, everywhere I go, parents and teachers are talking to me about this huge increase in visible symptoms and diagnoses.”

According to the wide-ranging 2015 survey, at any given time 7 per cent of Australian kids under the age of eleven have an anxiety disorder of some description—that’s approximately 140,000 children. While this represented a significant increase in the rate of diagnosed mental illness among Australian children, it was also the first time that anxiety disorders had been included in the study, making it difficult to discern a meaningful trend. Perhaps what we’re actually witnessing is simply an overdue acknowledgement of a long dormant issue. For years, the collage of symptoms we now recognise as anxiety have been written off as nervousness or immaturity. (This gels with Richardson’s experience: “I’ve had anxiety since I was four, but my parents just called me a worry wart.”) But now that we’re able to identify the disorder, we can suddenly see how prevalent it is; America’s Child Mind Institute estimates there’s been a 17 per cent increase in clinical diagnoses over the past decade.