The ABCs of CBT (Cognitive Behavior Therapy): Evidence-Based Approaches to Child Anxiety in Public School Settings
✍ Scribed by Lynn D. Miller; Christina Short; E. Jane Garland; Sandra Clark
- Publisher
- American Counseling Association
- Year
- 2010
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 113 KB
- Volume
- 88
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 1556-6678
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Anxiety disorders are well recognized as the most common psychological problem of children, adolescents, and adults. Pediatric prevalence rates of anxiety vary from 10% to 22% (Dadds, Spence, Holland, Barrett, & Laurens, 1997;Muris, Merckelbach, Mayer, & Prins, 2000), with a lifetime rate estimation of 28.8% (Kessler et al., 2005). Kendall (1994) and others suggested that anxiety disorders are not transient and, in the absence of treatment, can be associated with negative long-term complications (Kendall, Suveg, & Kingery, 2006;Sareen et al., 2005). By the time a child presents for treatment, deleterious effects have most probably already occurred in subtle ways (e.g., lower self-confidence, increased feelings of frustration) and may well lead to more gross and negative trajectories; childhood anxiety is predictive of other anxiety disorders, major depression, suicide attempts, alcohol abuse, and nicotine dependence (for review, see Ost & Treffers, 2003).
Anxiety symptoms in children can be relentless as they gradually interfere with or steal away normative, developmentally appropriate activities, relationships, and achievements. Parents, exhausted by trying to parent these sensitive children, vacillate between natural attempts to comfort them and complete exasperation when, for example, their child will not go to school in the morning. The school is frustrated with the episodic attendance of these youth. Parents feel blamed; often they are suspected of poor parenting skills or of having "something wrong at home," thus increasing their feelings of incompetence and despair. Anxiety disorders have a familial pattern as well, compounding family feelings of culpability.
Given the high prevalence of anxiety in children, the likely persistence of the disorder over time, the association with depression and other distressful outcomes, and the significant cost to the health care system (Stephens & Joubert, 2001), it is