Anxiety in Children: The Effects on Concentration and School Performance

Education is one of the most important aspects of a child’s life. What parent does not want their child to get a good education and lead a successful life? However, for children with anxiety, getting an education can be a struggle. This struggle can be such a monumental task for the child and family that each and every day can feel like an uphill battle against the child’s anxiety. All hope is not lost though, there are ways to help a child work through their anxiety and help them learn to enjoy school, or at least not hate it (for a start).

Stress and fear effect concentration and school work in negative ways. A lack of concentration can be one of the causes of poor school work. When a child cannot concentrate they will be unable to maintain focus on the tasks that teachers and parents ask of them. These children have a difficult time with excess stimuli because the anxiety is splintering their perceptions into sections. This causes road blocks in their thought process and leaves them with fear and anxiety.

When this happens the result can be low grades, poor performance, trouble maintaining peer relationships, dread of going to school, and trouble with homework. There is no single answer to why this is, but there are numerous possible explanations. Scientists who have researched anxiety have proven that anxiety can have a severe affect on the memory. More specific, research being held at The University of California has discovered the effects of stress hormones on the body and memory.

Have you ever been taking a test and your mind blanked? When your body experiences anxiety levels of hormones such as cortisol rise. This causes the brain to, “freeze up”. Over time your brain begins to function abnormally and is unable to retain information properly. For children who are experiencing stress, this memory loss, or inability to recall quickly, can result in a loss of concentration and cause low test scores and poor school performance.

This alone can cause abnormal anxiety over situations that most people would not fear. Then the fear itself causes emotional distress that will feed into already existing anxiety. Anxiety is a vicious loop that must be broken. As scientists uncover the link between fear and other emotional responses, they are starting to map fear and anxiety. This will help us better understand why some children become impaired when faced with stress, fear, and ultimately anxiety.

What they are discovering is that stress and fear are precursors to anxiety. While two people may experience the same stressful experience, one may develop extreme anxiety and the other will not. We cannot remove stress from life, but we can try to understand how stress affects our children.

To understand how lack of concentration affects the child we must search for triggers that make the child feel anxious. There is no argument that anxiety can cause a loss of concentration and poor school performance however there is often a breakdown between schools and home life. Both parents and teachers must be involved with the coping and learning process directly involved with anxiety. It is important for parents to help teachers understand what triggers your child’s anxiety. If your child hates school, has trouble making friends, and poor grades then your child is already trapped in an anxiety loop. If this is the case then we need to look for the triggers and break the loop.

When it comes to anxiety, poor concentration is one part of a whole. It is a common problem that can cause some of the symptoms we see that accompany anxiety. As you look at your child it is important to try to discover the difference between the problem and the symptoms. If your child is having trouble concentrating then you must consider all of the factors.

First, you must understand that physiologically there are things happening in the brain that may be causing the poor concentration. While we can not go into the brain and fix that (right now) we can understand it in ways that will lead to a better life for your child. What we can do is discover the chain of events within our children. If we begin to look at poor concentration and take a step back we can see a bigger picture that we can use to help the child.

For some of us, knowing how to concentrate is easy. For others, it is far more difficult to understand how to focus the mind and concentrate because stress and anxiety creeps in. This is why it is important to create situations where a child can learn concentration the same way one would learn a skill. You would not ask a child to write a ten-page book report on day one of first grade. By the same token, a child with anxiety needs to start out small and work their way towards something bigger.

When we do this we can identify when the child has the best concentration and the worst. As we identify triggers we can help the child work around them. We can learn how to minimize the chain of cause and effect by removing excess stimuli and situations that cause a lack of concentration. Once we learn how to maximize our child’s concentration we can help the child and teachers learn it as well and begin to improve school work.

If we can begin to remove the stress and fear associated with school we can begin to help a child learn how to spend more time concentrating and less time feeling anxiety. This will help them feel more confident and also improve memory and retention. As a child makes improvement, they will fell less fear and anxiety about school and their performance at school will improve.

Anxiety in children can be very complex and stressful for the whole family. However, when we start to understand it better we can break it down into chunks. We can ask ourselves questions that will lead us to answers. “What are the symptoms?”, “What are the problems?” What are the triggers?”, “What is the chain of cause and effect?”. Once you begin to answer these questions about your child you can begin to develop a clear cut plan that will help your child. This may sound very overwhelming at first but remember; once you have a clear cut plan you can begin to move your child and family forward in positive and exciting ways.

If you suspect your child may be suffering from anxiety, click below to learn more about what you can do to help:

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