Children's Anxiety Symptoms

Video Transcript

"I'm Dr. David Thomas. I'm a practicing psychotherapist in Tampa, Florida with Wilford Thomas Group speaking to you today about children's anxiety symptoms. Interestingly, children's anxiety symptoms are not much different than adult anxiety symptoms. When we talk about anxiety we do talk about one of the major blocks to happiness. The other three blocks are depression, guilt, and anger. Anxiety is probably the most intense, most uncomfortable emotion that we can experience. Anger and depression and guilt doesn't have the physiology that's often times associated with anxiety. The primary difference between symptoms associated with children versus adults is adults can be much more generalized over a variety of different areas from social to performance to more phobic-related specific situational anxiety, where children's anxiety symptoms generally fall in a area of achievement and performance. Not necessarily just academic achievement or performance but often times with athletics or just fitting in. So the symptoms, really for children as well as adults, are symptoms of a lot of avoidance behaviors, symptoms as far as that motor running very fast so you get a lot of heart palpitations, increased heart rate, increased perspiration, muscle aches. One thing you do tend to see in children a lot more than adults is a lot of ailments, excuses if you will, for why they can't do certain things, stomach ache, nauseousness, flu-like symptoms. You tend to see that quite as often with adults. So certainly children's anxiety is not much different than adult anxiety, it just tends to play it out much more so in performance and achievement and what you often times see is that avoidance-type behavior. I'm Dr. David Thomas speaking to you about symptoms associated with children's anxiety."