Helping Children Cope with Anxiety

Nancy Moran, Senior Pediatric Clinician at Summit Medical Group, joins Steve Adubato to discuss the surge in children battling anxiety, the several factors that create anxiety in children and what therapies caregivers can use to help their children find balance.

9/14/19 #112

 

 

 

 

Excerpt:

"We are pleased to welcome Nancy Moran, Senior Pediatric Clinician, Behavioral Health and Cognitive Therapy at Summit Medical Group. Good to see you. Thank you for having me. So many young people dealing with, or their parents are concerned about, anxiety. We'll talk about depression in a second. Define anxiety. Anxiety, we define anxiety as an overestimation of the danger and an underestimation of one's ability to cope with it. So it's worry. It's thinking that the world is a dangerous place. The world is unpredictable, and I might not be able to handle it. Depression is? Depression is more of a mood disorder. Depression is sadness. It could be loss of interest. It could go along with fatigue, loss of appetite, changes in sleep pattern. They can go together, but... Sorry for interrupting Nancy. Why do so many people, at least the ones who I talk to, when talking about younger people and adolescents? Mm hmm. Depression, anxiety, they throw it together... they throw them together. They're not necessarily together, but they can be? Mm hmm. Co... they can co-exist? Correct. These are often co-occurring disorders. I think that a person who worries for a long period of time, who feels anxious in their life all the time, can become really down and sad about that. Why does it seem... and I could be wrong, why does it seem that there are more and more young people either being diagnosed with anxiety? Mm hmm. Or we perceive that there are more? Which one is it, by the way? We definitely are seeing an increase in anxiety disorders. Not as much as the increase in depression. And we can make some guesses as to why that might be. Certainly, social media's a factor. We are hearing... How so? I think that kids don't get a chance to unplug. They're constantly tuned in to what's happening with their peers. They're constantly feeling that they have to compare themselves to others. And there's a lot of pressure associated with that. How many likes? Who's checking me out? What do I need to do? There's a young woman we know who, frankly, was posting some pictures on a social media site I'm not gonna say, who was making sure... who was trying to make sure that the pictures that she was posting, she was confident would get a lot of likes. Right. Which may not have been consistent with what she should be presenting to the world? Correct. Or her parents wanted her to present to the world? Does that make any sense? Absolutely. Also, we're hearing from kids that the academic world is more competitive, feels more competitive, but I think the most important factor to talk about..."