A new approach to tackling childhood anxiety

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Anxiety is on the rise, but resources for teachers are scarce. A newly launched program aims to equip teachers, parents and students with the skills they need to tackle anxiety in children

ANXIETY IS increasing among young Australians, and teachers are struggling to find the resources to help – but now, a large-scale intervention is being launched to help tackle this rising issue. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, almost 19% of people aged 15 to 24 had anxiety in 2020–21. This was attributed to the “perfect storm” of stressors facing young people – from

Parentshop provides engaging, action-based professional development and training events that deliver effective behaviour-change solutions for all ages. Parentshop’s training is for the people who look after children of all ages, who want to be catalysts for effective change for the new generation. Through Parentshop’s programs targeting anxiety, Parentshop seeks to lift the skills of school leaders, teachers, SLSOs and parents recognising anxiety in students and responding to such behaviours. In this way, we will support the efficacy of schools in supporting the achievement of high-level outcomes by students.

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“About 80% of school leaders say that student anxiety is a problem. However, 90% of them then said that they don’t have the resources to fix it”

Michael Hawton, Parentshop

Despite this, young people have been left with relatively few options when it comes to early intervention. According to Parentshop founder and psychologist Michael Hawton, anxiety can start very early in a child’s school years, with primary school being a vital time to start learning coping skills. However, figures have shown that the number of children who get cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) for anxiety is less than 3%. According to Hawton, child anxiety won’t be fixed by ‘one-trick ponies’ like yoga or music lessons, or by throwing more psychologists at the problem. Instead, he says there needs to be a larger-scale population change, and children must be taught coping skills by the significant adults in their lives – something the newly launched Anxiety Project hopes to achieve. “We’ve had a working partnership with the Australian Primary Principals Association for about five years, and one of the projects that we undertook was to assess the level of child anxiety in primary school students in Australia,” Hawton tells The Educator.

“According to our survey results, about 80% of school | leaders say that student anxiety is a significant problem. However, 90% of them then said that they don't have the resources to fix it. “It's not so much that there is a rise in anxiety disorders – those only represent about 6.9% of the child population,” Hawton explains. “This is more ‘anxiety in the making’, which means that children are speaking more anxiously, behaving more anxiously, and displaying more avoidant behaviour. A lot of

Champions of change Hawton says the survey showed a clear rise in anxiety among today’s children, compared to children in previous decades. Off the back of this, Parentshop began to work with the New South Wales Primary Principals’ Association, which was keen to develop a program that could be implemented by schools across the state. After two years of collaboration, the Anxiety Project is the result. It's a significant intervention program focused on teacher and parent training, which aims to equip students with the key skills they need to better cope with anxiety. “This intervention is going to take into account evidence-based practice on what helps children to be less anxious, and it’s also using a population-based change approach to try and change things on a larger scale,” Hawton says.

“It takes into account all the stakeholders – parents, leaders, schoolteachers and children – and looks at what issues we need to address with each of those stakeholders in order to help reduce child anxiety. “The project offers training with schools’ leaders, who we call our ‘champions’ or implementation coaches,” he explains. “We train them on how to run a change project, and then we also run teacher, parent and student training. At each level, there’s an intervention to equip all players with the skills they need to play their part in a larger population-change approach. “When it comes to treatment, we know what works,” he adds. “The cognitive behavioural therapy approach is the only evidence-based approach that we have. General counselling won't cut it, because it's actually not made to help with child anxiety. What will help is giving children the skill set to wrestle with their strong emotions and manage their own problems into the future.”

“[Anxiety] really is a progression unless something changes, and the good news is that seemingly modest interventions delivered by significant adults can make a really huge difference and turn that pathway around”

Michael Hawton, Parentshop

Turning the pathway While there is a shortage of child psychologists, Hawton says training ‘significant adults’ to help children deal with mental health struggles will make a huge difference to their outcomes in later life. The program trains adults to help children develop stronger problem-solving skills that enable them to reframe stressful situations and look at problems using evidence. It also focuses on arousal reduction and interruption techniques, all of which are key elements of the CBT approach. Hawton says that ultimately, the vast majority of anxieties are learned – and often, responding well to a stressor depends purely on whether you’ve been taught the right skills to cope.

“It should be noted that stress is not the same thing as anxiety,” Hawton says. “If two people face the same stressor, one person might get really anxious, while the other doesn’t, and that tells us that one person has learned some skills to be the boss of their anxiety. It’s also worth recognising that about 70% of anxieties are learned. “We know that at 11 years of age, about 6.9% of kids have an anxiety disorder,” he continues. “That rises to 11% by the time they're 15, and by the time they're 18 it's about 18.4%. It really is a progression unless something changes, and the good news is that seemingly modest interventions delivered by significant adults can make a really huge difference and turn that pathway around. “I’m very optimistic about this project, because even though we were in a state where leaders are saying that there's clearly more anxiety than there used to be, there are still some really big signs for hope,” Hawton concludes. “If you teach kids how to wrestle with their anxiousness, they'll get better and mentally stronger.” The Anxiety Project is available to schools across NSW, and it’s expected to be implemented in over 80 schools by next year. To find out more about the program, click here. In the last 12 months, Parentshop has been rolling out a similar teenage program, Resilience In Our Teens. This whole-school program is available Australia-wide, and Parentshop is taking expressions of interest from high schools for the 2023 program.

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global issues such as climate change, wars and pandemics, to personal stressors like finding an identity, deciding on a career path and managing relationships.

the principals surveyed have been in the job for 30-plus years, and so they're able to compare what's happening now with what was happening 10 or 15 years ago.”

Implementation coaches for teacher support

PROFESSIONAL LEARNING FOR TEACHERS and SLSOs

School leader training

Parent training

Data evaluation and feedback

The Anxiety Project: Key features

Equipping young children with these skills is therefore a valuable preventative strategy and should help prevent childhood anxiety from becoming a more serious disorder later in life.

Prevalence of anxiety disorders by age

11 years –

15 years –

18 years –

6.9%

11%

18.4%

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