Anxiety in children/teens

[berettafan]

Social, sports, music...so many opportunities for kids to feel stress on their shoulders. I really feel the 24/7 conversation held via social media, online gaming, etc worsens things.

Do you see excess anxiety in kids/teens as a worsening issue and if so what do you think contributes to it? what have you done to lessen it in your own kids? what resources have you used in addressing it?

[livi]

I can only concur vividly with your perception. In my daily work I see an alarming increase in children with stress related symptoms. Not least headache and pain from the stomach and intestines. I see migraine with preschool kids as young as three to five years old. There is physically nothing wrong with them. They are simply in pain. Typically, during the long Swedish summer holiday, they feel much better.
I believe our stoneage brains are not fit to handle all the constant input we are flooded with daily from very young age. Two year old kids with their faces planted at a Ipad. Its just not what we are evolutionary fitted for.

[VINMAN]

I think kids own parents are one of the main causes of stress and anxiety. Parents forcing kids to play 20 different sports/dance/ cheer/ clubs... etc,etc... so they can be part of the "parental in-crowd". A lot of these poor kids don't want to do these things, they are forced to. I see it in a good number of my friends with kids. It's really sad. Society sucks as it is, no need to burden our kids with more crap on their plates to worry about.


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[LWJ]

Yes!

I am on a personal mission to have my kids be kids. Play is real. Down time is valuable. I live in a pretty competitive community. The kids can burn out young. Not the way I want my children to live.

Get off the screen and get outside!

[RSBob]

Statistics show that preteen and teen suicide rates are unprecedented. Much of this is due to shaming and bullying on the interwebs because it’s so much easier than face to face.

I have no proof that kids kept constantly busy are unhappier than gamers, or druggies or run of the mill kids but see how people might jump to that conclusion possibly through projection.

Do I think it will get worse? The internet is proven to be polarizing with record number of folks calling themselves lonely no matter how many internet “friends” or followers they have. Yes it will get worse for our youth as long as their lives are spent behind screens. Perhaps keeping them busy in sports is more the answer than the problem because they develop team work, face to face relationships and parents who care enough to haul them around.

[crb07]

Originally Posted by LWJ

Yes!

I am on a personal mission to have my kids be kids. Play is real. Down time is valuable. I live in a pretty competitive community. The kids can burn out young. Not the way I want my children to live.

Get off the screen and get outside!

Amen. So glad I grew up with no internet.

Some really excellent thoughts in this thread. Part of it depends on the kid. And I think some kids need a shove to get out and do stuff, while others just do it naturally on their own. I definitely think the internet has isolated a lot of kids, because social media to a great extent reflects idealized lives that nobody leads. They end up thinking everyone else has it better than they do.

Toss in the opioid epidemic, which is killing people of all ages, but includes a lot of kids, and you have some screwed up messes out there.

But I have hope. When I was young, people predicted television would screw us all up, and look how great we all turned out!

[Rawknees'Turbo]

Originally Posted by madcorgi

. . .
But I have hope. When I was young, people predicted television would screw us all up, and look how great we all turned out!

True (the TV part), and totally hilarious - well done!

[ckelly78z]

From what I have seen with kids/teens/millenials is the tendancy to NOT enjoy the entertainment or activity right in front of them. They are more worried about potentially missing out on something even better on the internet going viral.

Last Sunday night, the 20 something sitting next to me at a NTPA tractor/truck pull only put his phone down long enough to plug his ears, and than he was right back to scanning facebook marketplace, and texting friends who were obviously doing the same thing....all the while, ignoring his cute, bored girl friend sitting on his other side.

[T77911S]

I don't know about adding stress but I have said for many years that video games are bad for kids, when done in excess like most do.
I think it promotes ADD in kids for one. the games now are so vivid and stimulating that a kid cant focus on something like a book. look at commercials on TV now. they know they need to trigger the senses in people so now they are so "fast" with screen shots like a video game.
we adopted a 12yr old boy. he was addicted to video games and I could see this in him. he could not sit still when doing homework. he literally would be upside down in his chair. he could not focus on something that was highly stimulating his brain. he was even "diagnosed" ADD and given meds. we took him off the meds. he also did not want to take them. we had to work with him on making him focus. school was tough but he got through it. seems to be doing great, does not play as much games as he use to

I have also said they dull kids sense of reality. what was that game that out years ago where you shoot cops or shoot hookers. the older generation will remember this, and it is quite funny but it confirms what I am saying. remember when TV edited the bugs bunny show because it was too violent and they said it was dulling the senses of kids?

[pavulon]

I think people (especially kids) today are lead to believe that their feelings are THE most important aspect of any decision or situation. The resulting erosion of rational and critical thinking is encouraging people to believe all their emotions instead of reality.

[berettafan]

so much fantastic discussion here, thanks all for contributing! Look forward to reading more here as others chime in.

[legion]

I'm just a year or two old enough to be a Gen Xer and not a millennial. (My little sister is a millennial but claims not to be one.) Growing up in Naperville in the 90's I first witnessed this. In seventh grade there was a girl on my street that us neighborhood kids never saw. I finally figured out she was taking dance lessons, and private saxophone lessons, and swimming lessons...she was scheduled every waking non-school hour of every day. We thought it was strange.

As I got into high school, I came to realize all the kids in honors classes were this way. They were all competing with each other for valedictorian. They were all trying to get into Ivy League and other elite schools and felt they needed huge resumes filled with tons of stuff. I remember a girl in one of my classes who was on crying uncontrollably for a week (and probably on the verge of suicide) when she didn't get into Notre Dame.

Some of them ended up slumming it and going to the same state school as me. I can't tell you how many of these kids ended up freaking out in college. They couldn't handle so much unstructured time.

My first roommate (with whom I was best friends in high school and had no idea he was this way) spent 3 hours every night on the phone with his mom (before cell phones) dissecting the past day and planning his next day. We ended up in a fist fight more or less because I refused to allow him (really, his mom) to plan my life as well. He moved out and I never spoke to him again.

I knew of several from my high school who dropped out in the first year because college (at the time) wasn't as easy as high school, they didn't know what to do with themselves and the anxiety got to them, or they found drugs/alcohol and self-medicated and/or went wild with their newfound freedom.

In my first month of college, I broke up with my high school girlfriend, my roommate and best friend moved out, and I got into a huge fight with my parents. I had the epiphany that no one was going to feel sorry for me or save me if I failed, so I knuckled down and decided to "get back" at all of those who wronged me by succeeding. I feel that many of my classmates had no preparation for making their own decisions or deciding on things for themselves.

And it's gotten much worse. College is no as easy as high school was in my day. It's no coincidence that colleges spend lavishly on lavish dormitories and students need safe spaces to get through the day: they've never been taught an ounce of self-reliance.

[flipper35]

The public school in our area is also an issue. They culture there is sports and if you don't do sports you don't count and it comes from the administration more than anyone else. They also have no discipline for the kids and let them behave as wild and rude as the kids like. Our oldest went from C/D average to honor roll when we moved to online public school where they were interested in teaching.

TV shows also have a lot of "humor" where they put each other down all the time and that gets copied by the kids as well.

I agree with the above about kids acting on emotion rather than critical thinking. I know several high school kids that melt down as soon as someone disagrees with them. They don't know how to debate or even convey why they think the way they do. No wonder Starbucks does so well!

I teach at a local university's school of business. It's highly selective, so they kids we get have always been the smartest kids in every class their whole lives. Until--bam! They end up in a room of similarly successful kids. The school imposes a mandatory median of 3.2 for the class, and, being old-fashioned, we only go to 4.0. That means for the first time in their lives, these kids are going to get less than perfect grades. Anxiety is high, to say the least.

A couple years ago, I tried telling the kids that grades weren't really all that important, in the sense that (a) they don't define you; and (b) once you get out of school nobody's going to care what grade you got in my class; they are going to care what you can do. I may as well have been talking to the wall. In my post-class instructor evaluations, several of the kids said they were offended that I had taken such a cavalier attitude about the importance of grades. One young lady even said "My grades do define me!" And I've had kids come to see me, crying, telling me that they didn't know how they were going to explain their 3.2 grade to their parents. and . . . I've even had a young lady come see me, dressed for, shall we say, "success," to negotiate her grades. That meeting took place in the hall outside my office with my teaching assistant in attendance!

My wife has a theory: we need to teach kids to fail, because most of life is failure. It's a biological imperative. Too many kids glide from one illusory success to the next illusory success, until they smack into the brick wall of reality, ill-prepared. When I was growing up, I was a skinny, uncoordinated little kid (hard to believe now), horrible at stick and ball sports. But I wanted to play, so I went through years of warming the bench, playing right field, and having grounders go between my legs to let the winning run score. I was a complete failure as an athlete, and learning to deal with that gave me a real advantage later in life.

[RKDinOKC]

Made me think of a State championship HS B Ball game between two local schools. One happened to be my Alma mater so went. One team played only their star players and wore them out. The other team, my alma mater was just happy to make it to the chamionship and played EVERONE on the them. At one point they put in a guy that was basically fat albert. He wa playing B ball for the fun of it, obviously not because he was good or even athletic. When they put him in the home crowed really cheered him on.

The game went into so may overtimes I lost count. My alma-mater eventually won.

It was very interesting to see the different strategies for the championship game.

[berettafan]

Corgi I had a discussion about this with an old friend just last week. He told me he reminds his kids that they should define themselves by their walk with God and not athletic or even academic achievements. I see you mentioning how kids define themselves and it drives the point home even further.

Of course a non religious person might substitute 'walk with God' with 'how you treat others and conduct yourself' or some very similar concept. In either case it seems good advice.

[flipper35]

madcorgi, I agree on that point that kids these days don't know how to handle failure.

Some of our greatest inventors failed a lot so they could succeed. Now days everyone wins so when they get to real life and fail it is an unknown problem to them.

There is some hope. I had my annual review and I am not a people person but is something I am working on. My 30 year old boss said she has a hard time when people come crying to her. She said she just wants to tell them to suck it up and get on with life.

Originally Posted by berettafan

Corgi I had a discussion about this with an old friend just last week. He told me he reminds his kids that they should define themselves by their walk with God and not athletic or even academic achievements. I see you mentioning how kids define themselves and it drives the point home even further.

Of course a non religious person might substitute 'walk with God' with 'how you treat others and conduct yourself' or some very similar concept. In either case it seems good advice.

Good advice indeed.

I'm not religious myself, plus I'm dyslexic, so I walk with dog. Same thing.