School Anxiety

Going back to school can be exciting—but it can also bring stress, anxiety and worry for some kids. ADAA member expert Alexandra Bennett, LCSW, gives six insightful tips to help manage back-to-school anxiety.

Back-to-school season can trigger anxiety in children. Parents can best support their children by involving them in preparations, fostering healthy routines, validating feelings without over-accommodating, and encouraging gradual exposure to uncertainty to build resilience and confidence.

Learn practical tips to help support your children through the back-to-school transition—covering how to validate mixed emotions, build confidence, reduce uncertainty, and provide steady, calming support for a smooth start to the year.

With school in full swing for students across the country, parents and caregivers could begin to see signs of school refusal. Rogers Behavioral Health’s Dr. Heather Jones explains how to identify it and provides strategies for helping your child overcome it.

The start of the school year means new routines, classmates, and teachers. While returning to school brings anticipation and excitement, many students struggle with worries and fears beyond what’s considered the first-day jitters.

As parents we don’t like or want to see our children struggling. But worries, fears and anxieties are a natural part of life, and we have to understand that children go through these processes just like adults do. But as parents and caregivers, we should also be in tune with the degree, severity, frequency, and nature of our children’s fears and worries and know when a child might need some help.

Fear is one of the six basic human emotions, with a clear evolutionary purpose: to help us respond to danger and survive. In Exposure Therapy, providers create a safe environment to intentionally “expose” their clients to objects, activities, or situations they fear.

The headlines and the CDC report are indeed alarming, but they should serve as a wakeup call to all of us. Yes, we should think seriously about why we are seeing a steep decline in the mental health of teenage girls, but we have to come together now as parents, family, friends, educators, clinicians, providers, and as a society to support, enhance and establish more preventive measures for our youth.