Easing Back-to-School Anxiety in Children and Teens: Tips for Parents

Back to school time can be stressful for most children, teens and their parents. For young people with anxiety, this stress is heightened. Their minds fill with “what ifs” and worst case scenarios, and without any real interactions at school for a couple months, anxious imaginations can go wild:

Will my teachers be nice? Will I fail a class? Will my friends remember me? Will I have to eat lunch alone? Will I get lost in the school building? Will people treat me kindly? What if I trip up the stairs? What if I don’t know anyone in my math class? What if I don’t understand anything in chemistry? I shouldn’t have signed up for that AP class. I shouldn’t have taken Photography and not Trig. What was I thinking? What am I doing? What am I going to do? I can’t handle this. I won’t be able to make it. I don’t want to go to school.

Just reading the thoughts above may feel overwhelming to you, but the truth is that for an anxious young person, this can be their reality. The worry center of the brain takes over, and a single worry about a teacher can start a downward spiral. That spiral ends with the young person deciding that school will be a terrible experience and saying they don’t want to go back in the fall.

Young people can learn to cope with their anxieties, but at first they may not know where to begin. Use the tips below to start to understand the anxiety and to help your young person have a positive return back to school.