Parenting and Development of Anxiety Disorders in Children

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, cases of depression and anxiety have risen. Even before the pandemic, cases of depression and anxiety were already on the rise (Paquette, 2024). According to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America (2024), anxiety disorders, including post-traumatic stress disorders, affect forty million Americans annually.

The question becomes why. Various factors contribute to an anxiety disorder. In this article, I will focus on problem areas involving parent-child relationships and how they can contribute to an anxiety disorder.

The Parenting Dilemma

The role of parents has always been difficult. Generally, parents want to do the best job possible raising their children. Growing up, I remember my parents talking about Dr. Benjamin Spock. Millions of parents trusted Dr. Spock’s advice because he was a pediatrician for several decades. Today, parents frequently do not have time to read books. Thus, they get their advice from the internet and social media for expert analysis.

There are several problems with getting information from the Internet and social media. First, information from the Internet and social media is not always accurate. Second, children do not fit into the one-size-fits-all category. Each child is different based on temperament, attachment style, and other variables.

Third, even if the information is accurate, parents are not always equipped to apply these principles properly. Fourth, there is a tendency for parents to compare their children to other children. Thus, when these internet and social media experts offer their advice, parents may feel frustrated with their children, because they do not meet their expectations based on the visual presentations on the internet and social media of other children.

Anxiety Disorders In Children and Parental Over-Involvement

The second problem area is over-involvement or under-involvement. There are three problems with over-involvement. The first type of problem parenting is helicopter parenting. Helicopter parenting occurs when the parent asserts too much control over the child.

The second type of problem is snowplow parenting. Snowplow parenting occurs when a parent removes all obstacles for the children by not allowing them to face the natural and logical consequences of their actions and inhibits the child’s social learning.

The third type of problem parenting is gymnastic parenting. Gymnastic parenting requires children to seek the “perfect 10” in everything, creating a lot of pressure on children to be perfect.

I am not against parents placing their children in gymnastics – both of my sisters participated in gymnastics for many years. However, in these activities, I have witnessed frequent and great pressures placed on children to perform with little or no margin of error leading to future mental health struggles.

All these forms of over-involvement can lead children to develop anxiety in childhood or later in adulthood. Simone Biles experiencing social anxiety during the 2021 Olympics in Tokyo, is an example of the price of becoming a Gold Medal-caliber gymnast.

Anxiety Disorders In Children and Parental Under-Involvement

In cases of uninvolved parents, parents tend not to respond to their children’s needs and not to make any demands on their children. As a result, children develop anxious attachment problems toward their parents and other significant adults in their lives. These parents may be absorbed in their problems and neglect their children. As a result, the children may be parenting their own parents.

When children receive little supervision and guidance from parents, these children miss out on critical mentoring experiences and may experience abandonment issues as adults. When children receive little to no warmth, affection, and love from their parents, these children may develop trust issues with their future romantic partners or use maladaptive means to have their needs met.

Anxiety Disorders In Children and Parental Anxiety

The third problem area is a lack of parental emotional self-regulation. Paquette (2024) pointed out that most adults believe that the world is a more dangerous place than it has ever been. From a cognitive-behavioral perspective, individuals develop anxiety when they overestimate risk and view neutral items as dangerous.

Feeding their anxiety, the news media, internet, and social media tend to broadcast the direst news repeatedly each day. Constant exposure to grim news leads to a lack of emotional regulation. When parents are unable to regulate their fears, fears become projected onto their children. As a result, children tend to develop the belief that the world is worse than ever.

As a society, we easily forget that our cars are constantly improving in safety. Our jobs overall contain less risk to life and limb than one hundred years ago. We fail to remember that the worldwide infant mortality rate has decreased, and overall life expectancy has increased in the last century.

The Danger of Personal Electronics

The fourth problem area is the lack of parental supervision over electronics. Even before the pandemic, social media began to target adolescents, children, and young children for audience share. Social media dependency has led to increases in anxiety disorders among children and young adults.

Frequently, social media and other forms of entertainment have replaced quality play time among children. In the last five years, teenagers have experienced a fifty percent reduction in face-to-face interactions (Paquette, 2024).

In the last fifty years, there has been a substantial increase in screen time with computers, gaming systems, and social media. There has also been a dramatic decrease in unstructured, unsupervised play among children in the last twenty years. Children were physically active throughout history until technological developments in the last fifty years (Paquette, 2024).

To complicate things, there are too many “Mrs. Kravitzs” (nosy neighbors) in the world who will report parents to CPS if they feel that children are not supervised enough. On the one hand, children should never be neglected or abandoned by their parents. At the same time, parents should have the freedom to make their own decisions about parenting and their children’s activity levels.

Cognitive-behavioral therapists use behavioral activation with children to resolve issues with anxiety because children have not fully developed their brains to use cognitive techniques. Likewise, parents should encourage their children to get active with outdoor activities and be less reliant on electronic forms of entertainment.

Anxiety Disorders In Children and Bad Coping Strategies

The fifth problem area is the inadvertent parental exposure of their children to maladaptive coping strategies. Avoidance is a maladaptive coping strategy for many types of anxiety disorders. While avoidance may be an effective temporary strategy, it leads to anxiety disorders when overused.

Intolerance of uncertainty leads to catastrophizing where an individual believes that the future is always the worst-case scenario. Individuals believe that they can control everything. In all three maladaptive coping strategies, children learn from their parents and exaggerate the intensity of the anxiety. As described above, children overestimate risk and learn that neutral objects are dangerous and life-threatening.

Other Factors

In addition to these parental factors, numerous psychological factors are also hard to control. A child may be exposed to stressors from his or her mother while in the mother’s uterus. A gynecologist may expose a child inadvertently to trauma if the child is taken out via C-section quickly due to delivery complications.

The mother, due to mental health or intellectual disabilities, may not form a proper attachment to her child. A child may have been born into a family with intergenerational trauma, chronic unemployment, constant occupational stressors, poverty, one that is part of a racial minority, and/or a member of other historically marginalized communities. A child may have a parent with a physical disability.

Other psychological factors are more controllable. A child may have been born into a family where physical and other forms of domestic violence are historically condoned. The child may experience adverse childhood experiences growing up from abuse, neglect, divorce, substance use by parents, and/or incarceration of a parent. Parents develop a toxic relationship between themselves or introduce their children to their new toxic or abusive partners.

Conclusion

This article was not written with the intent to bash parents. Most parents do the best they can with their children. Two major factors create and maintain anxiety that were not covered in this article for the sake of brevity: cognitive development and genetics.

How individuals interpret situations, and the role of genetics account for a large part of how anxiety disorders are created and maintained. This article also did not cover spiritual principles found in the Bible on how to manage anxiety. This article was written to highlight the importance of parents and their influence on children.

If you have questions about anxiety disorders, how to parent an anxious child, how to apply Biblical principles to managing anxiety, or experiencing an anxiety disorder (s), please be part of the 37 percent of Americans who are seeking treatment for anxiety disorders (ADAA, 2024). At Spokane Christian Counseling, we would be happy to assist you.