Panic Attacks on Children

I was doing some articles for my writing job and I stumbled on a topic that revolves around Children and their stress level. Sharing some helpful ideas about what factors contribute to our kids anxiety and stress, causing their panic attacks:

Title: What Causes Panic Attacks in Children
Angelica R. Casino
October 19, 2009

Children are the least we thought to be affected by anxiety disorders, and the least to experience panic attacks. However, this notion should be discarded as anxiety disorders affect everyone, including children as young as five years old. And the possibility of panic attacks increase when our young ones start to hit adolescence.

Anxiety is a sense of despair, apprehension and fear. These anxiety attacks, or most commonly known as panic attacks, affect school-age children and teenagers, yet are often simply dismissed as attention seeking tactics. The lack of verbal inability to fully communicate their emotions is one of the primary reasons why panic attacks happen in our children. The multiple emotions on varying experiences overwhelm them and a sense of foreboding manifests.

Peer, family, academic and social pressures are contributing factors that affect children and teenagers. Kids these days are no longer living in world of Peter Pans and candies, they are driven and motivated to be better, wiser, and stronger. What was a healthy competition before, the idea of “sibling rivalry” was introduced firstly between direct siblings and then between cousins and close peers. The desire to be better than the other is an innate aspiration of man. Thus, competitions among our fellows are always welcome.

The pressure brought about by competition coupled with problems in family and peer relationship can cause a certain increase in stress level our children can handle. Due to minimal outlets of expression, our kids tend to bottle up their thoughts and emotions. And the build up engulfs our youngsters and eventually cause panic attacks.

Sometimes, our problems within the family also affect our kids. Financial worries, relationship problems, and even work-related conflicts may affect our children in ways we seem to dismiss as impossible. These kids are sponge-like in nature, they take in what they see, hear and feel within our homes. And they do get affected as much as they do understand the situation. More often, they perceive things in a different way, and if they see the parents or older people in the household worrying, they tend to worry also. In cases where a parent or an immediate family member faces or experiences job loss, a scrimping in the budget, depression and higher temper levels among family members contribute mainly to stress level increase.

Other causes of panic attacks in our children are results of a traumatic experience. Issues ranging from divorce, separation, sudden movements from one town to another to physical and emotional abuse directly contribute to panic attacks in our children.

What adults have to remember is that our youngsters are fully capable of understanding and are perceptive of their surroundings. They are also capable of feeling what we adults also feel. The mistake we often take is that we underestimate our kids to be detached from our reality when we happen to cultivate in them, more often than not unknowingly, the sense of competition, drive, and awareness to our surroundings and an introduction to our known reality.

The more we learn on helping them understand our world and reality would help them in coping with daily pressures. We also need to learn to help our kids communicate their thoughts and emotions frequently and precisely.

Panic attacks in our children can be avoided if we start taking care of our issues at hand immediately and take time to discuss thoughts with our children. Though these communication lines are open, let us not however forget, that our children cannot fully understand the situation and problems. Thus, we need to remember that our kids are not adults that are supposed to carry our pressures with us. Nor are they ignorant that we shield them from the reality.


** Will try to post more of health-related articles when allowable :)