What parents need to know and when to seek treatment
By Navneet Patti, MD
Psychiatric Center of Northwest Ohio at Caughman Health Center
Anxiety is a normal emotion essential for survival and functions as our brain’s inherent response to perceived danger. It facilitates the avoidance of danger in many scenarios, meaning it is adaptive and not necessarily pathological.
While childhood and adolescence are a vulnerable age for the development of anxiety disorders, children also manifest many fears and anxieties that are developmentally appropriate. These include separation anxiety, nightmares, fears of thunder or monsters in toddlerhood, fears of ghosts, germs, and academic performance in school-age children, and fears of negative evaluation from peers in adolescence. These phenomena occur in most children over the course of their development and while they can be very stressful in the moment, they are often transient and do not necessarily need a child psychiatrist’s attention.
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