Parents’ Anxiety Can Affect Children

When parents suffer emotional problems, those problems can affect their children. Children who have a parent suffering from an anxiety disorder are also likely to exhibit anxiety. In a new study, researchers at Johns Hopkins Children’s Center have found that family counseling has the ability to prevent anxiety disorders in the children of parents with anxiety disorders.

In a small-scale study to be published in the June issue of the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, researchers found that psychological damage from childhood anxiety could be minimized or prevented when families participated in as few as eight weekly family sessions of cognitive behavioral therapy. Over the course of a year, family counseling sessions used cognitive-behavioral techniques to help parents modify behaviors that contributed to their children’s anxiety, including overprotection, excessive criticism and excessive expression of fear and anxiety in front of their children. Children were also taught coping and problem-solving skills.

“If psychiatrists or family doctors diagnose anxiety in adult patients, it’s now clearly a good idea that they ask about the patients’ children and, if appropriate, refer them for evaluation,” said the study’s senior investigator Golda Ginsburg, Ph.D., a child psychologist at Johns Hopkins Children’s Center and associate professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, in an internet press release on newswise. Ginsburg said the research indicates new treatment protocols for anxiety patients who are parents, noting that few doctors today consider the ramifications of parents’ mental illnesses on their children.

The Johns Hopkins study indicated that the children of parents who had been diagnosed with an anxiety disorder were seven times more likely to develop an anxiety disorder themselves. Sixty-five percent of children living with an anxious parent evidenced anxiety symptoms that met the criteria for an anxiety disorder. One in five U.S. children is affected by an anxiety disorder that often goes undiagnosed. In children, undiagnosed anxiety or delayed treatment can lead to depression, poor academic performance and substance abuse that can last throughout childhood and follow a child into adulthood. For these reasons, the Johns Hopkins team has been focusing on techniques to prevent, rather than treat, childhood anxiety. A larger study involving 100 families is now underway.