Your guide to understanding your child's anger... When is anxiety a trigger?
There are many potential causes of intense and frequent emotional outbursts, including anxiety disorders.
Children often do not express their fears to adults for many reasons, including not realizing that they are in an unusual situation.
Validating children's concerns is the first step to understanding more about children.
The parents brought 8-year-old Sally to the psychiatric clinic, and they were frustrated by the tantrums, meltdowns that happen all the time, without warning, but the most common motive is leaving the house - including going to school. Then Sally gets angry, throws things, calls her parents terrible names, and sometimes pushes or kicks them if they try to get close to her. Eventually, she was diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder, and psychotherapy helped her, along with medication (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors), and her symptoms greatly improved with treatment.
Tantrums as a symptom of anxiety can seem confusing, especially to parents and teachers, who often think of tantrums as a "behavior" that children use to get what they want, but intense and persistent tantrums that don't respond to typical strategies means something is wrong, and anxiety is one of the most important causes. Possible severe or persistent collapses, in addition to other causes.
Anxiety keeps us alive
Anxiety serves important functions in our lives. When the brain detects a potential threat, it generates a whole-body response to manage the threat - to keep us alive. Other parts of our brain normally help us process other information to indicate the level of threat and modulate our responses. But without more data, the "back of the brain", which manages survival processes, perceives the threat and triggers a "life-or-death" response.
Our brain and body respond to stresses that we perceive as life-threatening in three primary ways:
Fighting Fight
Escape Flight
Antifreeze Freeze
Central to all of these responses is that the blood veers away from the front of our brains, where logical thinking, communication, problem-solving, and other similar tasks occur. We just focus on avoiding the threat. Flight response operates from threat. The freeze response is kept as constant as possible to avoid detection. A combative response is exactly what it sounds like - a willingness to fight to eliminate a threat.
Anxiety disorders disrupt threat detection and response systems
Children with anxiety disorders have highly adapted monitoring devices for detecting threats. Their brains and bodies are on high alert all the time, alert to danger - to the point where they may see danger in situations that are not an objective threat. But it is their awareness of the threat that worries them. Therefore, if a child with anxiety is in a situation that their brain interprets as high risk, their brain and body go into a fight, flight, or freeze mode.
Combat mode can lead to unusual meltdowns. The seizures range in severity, but the most serious can look as if your child has become something or someone else entirely. Even very young children may curse, tell their parents they hate them, threaten to hurt their parents, destroy an entire room, kick and punch, and scream as loud as they can. And if this happens at the school, it could cause an entire class to vacate.
An anxious child's brain and body can respond to perceived threats as a matter of life or death, because children do not yet have a solid vocabulary to describe these feelings, or the fear itself prevents them from expressing their fears out loud. And if a request is made that arouses or escalates their perception of a threat, their little human selves enter into full combat mode - because they (mistakenly) perceive the need to fight to survive.
These extreme meltdowns can come from anxiety because the brain has triggered life/death protocols. The frontal lobe of the brain is in "low energy" mode, to conserve fuel for attack, defense and survival. Understanding this changes everything in how we deal with an anxious child who has severe meltdowns. Finding and treating an anxiety disorder is essential to helping a child return to living their children's normal lives.
Meltdowns are a 'combat' response
For baby Sally, it gradually becomes clear that she has many concerns about her family and home. Sally thought her mother might get sick or die while she was at school, that thieves would come, or that a fire would start. She believed that staying home to watch things would help everyone stay safe. She had a lot of these fears at night, and she often had tantrums before going to bed. She was afraid that bad things would happen when she was asleep, too. So, she was not only anxious, but also very exhausted,
She didn't talk about these thoughts with anyone, in part because she didn't realize that they were thoughts everyone had. She was also afraid that if she told someone, they would try to convince her that it was safe, and would make her leave the house more. She felt bad that she was always causing a lot of trouble at home and that her parents were very upset, but she didn't know how to change things.
Sally's parents were so frustrated they knew he was worried; They've tried all the parenting and behavior modification programs found in books and online, behavior charts, stickers, rewards, punishments, and countdowns. Family members and other parents suggested that Sally was manipulating them and that they should just pick her up and kick and scream and put her in the car, which they attempted, which, as expected, escalated her ordeal and
exacerbated the collapse.
Most of the days, Sally would eventually get to school late after being exhausted and unable to fight anymore, but there were days when she couldn't go to school at all. The teachers and the school were frustrated with her and her parents, wondering why they couldn't control an 8-year-old. At school, Sally was distracted, irritable, and aloof. Multiple emails were exchanged and many meetings took place. The assumption was that her tantrums were under her control and that it was a "behavioural" problem and that more behavior management was the answer. But the solutions were to the wrong problem.
How do we know he is worried?
So how do we know if a child's tantrums or meltdowns are motivated by anxiety? If you have concerns about your child's outbursts that seem unusual or are exhausting for everyone, please speak to your pediatrician about it. It is important that the child be medically evaluated to rule out medical causes of irritability and collapse. Your pediatrician can also refer you for a psychological evaluation.
At the same time, you can also begin to gather some information about your child's level of anxiety. Listening to your child's gossip and watching your child play and behavior are the best places to start. Try not to ask too many direct questions - which tend to shut off kids - unless they come to you worried. If they express their concerns, most importantly, validate them. Let them know their fear is real - don't dismiss it as silly or not as real. Their feelings are totally real - and you'll learn more about them if you're curious and don't ignore them.
If you discover that your child has more fears than you initially knew, those fears may contribute to his breakdown. It can help you begin to change your approach to dealing with episodes of distress.
Preventing breakdowns caused by anxiety needs to be dealt with with a gentle touch
How do we deal with meltdowns caused by anxiety? The basics for managing children with anxiety attacks often differ from typical recommendations for dealing with anger. Remember that we are dealing with the "back of the brain" that deals with life-threatening danger, so our response will be more effective when we take this into account. The approach includes:
Try to spot the child's escalating distress as soon as possible.
Once you notice the escalation, stop discussing the original request.
Check your emotional tone - try to remain as empathetic as possible.
Use as few words as possible.
Avoid commands like "You have to calm down now."
Give the child some time and space to recover.
Stay close to him and reach out to him if he chooses to.
Model and encourage calming skills, such as counting breaths or eating a snack or drink.
All this takes a long time; And we can't do this every time. And it is true that it takes time - it stops you from completing your tasks. But meltdowns also shut down the process of completing tasks, and everyone ends up emotionally draining in the process. Our typical responses heighten the perceived danger to the anxious child. We need to lower the perceived threat level before we can engage in problem-solving with the child.
Once the child has calmed down again, we can re-engage with his fears, if he can express them, or move slowly and/or calmly to get through the transition. Angry kids often have great anxiety going right under the surface. Keeping an open mind about this and not getting into a tunnel vision about angry children is essential to relieving the child's suffering.
