Why are smart kids falling behind and what can we do to help them?

Anxiety is something that all people face at multiple points in their life; be it stress from an upcoming test, worries about covering all your bills at the end of the month, or being places into an uncomfortable and possibly dangerous situation. However, the hope is that as children grow, they are able to develop coping methods to manage and alleviate some of the stresses caused by this anxiety.  

However, not all children are able to develop these coping methods and instead fall into a high risk of developing other psychiatric disorders, especially those within the internalizing spectrum. Some children are naturally very anxious, even quite early in life. These children, as various studies are showing, may display a mixture of psychological, behavioral, or other symptoms such as behavioral inhibition or even delayed progress in school.

Researchers the University of Chicago studied anxiety associated with doing math among school children and found that children as young as first grade were experiencing extreme math anxiety. Surprisingly, researchers found that is was the highest achieving students that experienced the highest amounts of math anxiety. This high level of math anxiety found within these students placed them almost half a year behind the rest of their peers. It seems that these high achieving students are so anxious because of the fear of failure or looking less talented, by counting on their fingers or using other simple skills. Positively, researchers at University of Chicago also found that writing or drawing about their anxiety was able to reduce their math anxiety.

In a hope for the future of anxiety treatment researchers at John Hopkins found that nearly half (47%) of children, teens, and young adults with severe anxiety were disease-free six years after treatment. It seems that it’s not the type of treatment, but the fact that the patients were receiving some form of therapy that brought about the positive results. These patients received cognitive-behavioral therapy, medication, or a combination of the two, however it should be noted that 70% of those who improved needed some type of intermittent therapy in the years following the original treatments.

These findings that both cognitive therapy as well as medications may help treat anxiety indicate that the root of the problem is not purely biological or environmental but possibly a mixture of the two. Recent research has worked to delve into the specific brain areas associated with anxiety and attempt to find the key to the extreme anxiety felt by these children. Multiple studies have made great advances at trying to pin point the specific brain regions associated with anxiety, linking suspected brain regions across multiple species including humans, monkeys, and even rats.

These studies, although they may not be grandiose in their current findings, are essential stepping-stones in the fight against the crippling anxiety far too many children currently suffer from.

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Acknowledgements

Harms, W. (2012, December 12). Math anxiety causes trouble for students as early as first grade. UChicago News. Retrieved April 27, 2012, from news.uchicago.edu/article/2012/09/12/math-anxiety-causes-trouble-early-first-grade

Less Than Half of Children Treated for Anxiety Achieve Long-Term Relief. (2014, January 29). John Hopkins Medicine News and Publication. Retrieved April 27, 2014, from www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/less_than_half_of_children_treated_for_anxiety_achieve_long_term_relief

Kalin, N. H., Qi, C., Roseboom, P., Nanda, S., Lane, J., & Speers, J. (2010). Anxiety-related behavioral inhibition in rats: a model to examine mechanisms underlying the risk to develop stress-related psychopathology. Genes, Brain and Behavior, 9, 974-984.

Shackman, A., Fox, A., Oler, J., Shelton, S., Davidson, R., & Fox, N. (2013) Neural mechanisms underlying heterogeneity in the presentation of anxious temperament. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 110 (15), 6145-6150.