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Guiding parents and teachers to navigate the challenges of Anxiety

Anxiety is thought to be the most common mental health or neurodevelopmental condition worldwide. Even outside of a global pandemic and other stress-inducing aspects of societal upheaval, the pace and expectations of modern society seem to be causing a steady rise in symptoms of anxiety across the globe. Parents are worried, teachers are stressed, and their students are getting increasingly more anxious. Anxiety can significantly (cont'd below)

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Leading Articles about Managing Anxiety

Recovering Perfectionist

I’m a Recovering Perfectionist – Want to Join Me?

By Elaine Taylor-Klaus

Failure Fosters Growth As a perfectionist in recovery, there are no 12 steps in my program. It was developed while…

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teacher training and ADHD

What To Do When Kids Push Back With Sass and Disrespect

By Elaine Taylor-Klaus and Diane Dempster

In this tip, Diane and Elaine talk about what to do when kids push back, and their behaviors come across…

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Relieve Mental Stress

3 Tricks to Relieve Mental Stress (Every Day)

By Elaine Taylor-Klaus

Stress seems to be a staple in our lives these days. Everywhere we turn, there are people rushing, there is…

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choose your thoughts

Choose Your Thoughts, Change Your… Kids’ Video Usage?!

By Alan Brown

You want to reign in your kids’ use/abuse of video games and gadgets, right? Does the old saying, “Do as I say, not as I do,” ring any bells? Does this mean that you should keep off screens, yourself, to model “good” behavior? Not exactly. Sure, in the everyday struggles of parenting a child with complex issues like ADHD, Anxiety and more, it’s imperative that you set the example.

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teen stressed laptop

Is Anxiety Making it More Difficult to Diagnose ADHD?

By Jim Varga

Modern-day management and diagnosis of ADHD all too often leave out one major factor: the increasing rates of anxiety in…

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handle mistakes

The Healthy Way to Handle Mistakes

By Diane Dempster

Penicillin. Potato chips. The Slinky. Scotch Gard. The Pacemaker. Fireworks. Post-its. What if there were no mistakes? I’m not saying that…

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I don't know

Three Steps to Take When Your Kid Says, “I Don’t Know”

By Diane Dempster

Blank Stares As parents, it can be difficult to effectively engage our kids in the process making decisions for themselves.…

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teacher training and ADHD

Preparing Teens with ADHD and Anxiety to Leave Home

By Elaine Taylor-Klaus and Diane Dempster

Preparing any teen to leave the nest can be hard. Preparing your teens with ADHD and anxiety to leave home…

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Teach Your Kids to Stop Asking Questions

By Elaine Taylor-Klaus

Teach your kids to stop asking questions… Sounds crazy, right? I mean, we’re always telling our kids that there are…

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(continued) impair a student’s availability to learning; its close companion, stress, can reduce the effectiveness of an adult’s communication. According to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), nearly 1 in 3 of all adolescents ages 13 to 18 will experience an anxiety disorder; the Anxiety and Depression Association of America puts the number for adults at 1 in 5.

Many strategies are offered to help children, teens and adults manage the symptoms of anxiety, including: medications, stress management training, meditation and mindfulness practices, cognitive behavior therapy (CBT), some forms of coaching, sleep hygiene, and breathing techniques. New and promising CBD research is revealing potential options for support in addition to commonly prescribed medications. As with ADHD and many other conditions impacting children, when parents receive behavior management training, they are better able to create an environment that can effectively support their children and teens with anxiety.

Symptoms of anxiety vary. On one end of the spectrum, generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) is reflected in more than 3% of the population who tend to feel anxious most days and struggle to remember when they felt relaxed. Social anxiety is another form of anxiety that occurs specifically in certain social dynamics.

On the other end of the spectrum, anxiety is a symptom of other mental health conditions such as panic disorders, post traumatic stress disorder, phobias, or obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). Anxiety also commonly coexists in children and teens with other health and learning conditions such as ADHD, learning disabilities, autism and depression. Again, according to the NIH, between 2007 and 2012, anxiety disorders in children and teens went up 20%.