When children are anxious, they may be prone to avoidance and other negative behavior. If left unchecked, anxiety can also affect their social skills, academic performance, and overall well-being. For these reasons, it’s important that parents and caregivers understand the importance of identifying child anxiety and seek professional guidance to ensure that their children receive proper treatment.
Identifying child anxiety requires the use of specific diagnostic tools, and healthcare professionals can use several methods to assess a child’s symptoms. Questionnaires and surveys allow for standardized assessment, enabling professionals to compare a child’s responses with established norms to identify patterns. These assessments can also help healthcare professionals understand how anxiety impacts a child’s daily functioning, and they can be used to guide treatment strategies.
In addition to questionnaires and surveys, clinical interviews are an essential tool for assessing a child’s anxiety symptoms. In a clinical interview, a healthcare professional engages in a face-to-face conversation with a child and their parent or caregiver to discuss the child’s anxiety symptoms. This type of assessment allows for a deeper understanding of the child’s anxiety, including its triggers and impact, and it can be a critical component in establishing a therapeutic relationship.
A recent study found that almost one in nine children experience an anxiety disorder, but because these children are often quiet and compliant, their problems go unnoticed. Anxiety can lead to a range of problems, including poor school performance, addiction, depression, and suicide. This is why it’s so important that parents, caregivers, and teachers take a proactive approach to addressing childhood anxiety, by looking for signs of distress, and seeking the assistance of a mental health professional when needed.
The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recently recommended that primary care doctors screen all children 8 and older for anxiety. This screening can be done by using a simple, widely-used test, the Screen for Child Anxiety Related Disorders (SCARED). This includes a series of questions about debilitating anxiety symptoms, such as excessive worry, trouble breathing, or a pounding heart. The test can be completed in less than 10 minutes and is designed to be administered by a child’s pediatrician or family doctor.
This test has a number of important improvements over previous versions. The new RCMAS-2 retains the simplicity, quick administration time (10 to 15 minutes), elementary reading level, and content-based item clusters that made previous versions so popular, while adding a convenient Short Form, updated ethnically diverse norms, and other features.
The RCMAS-2 is an excellent choice for physical therapists working in inpatient, outpatient, and school-based settings. The test can be easily administered as part of a patient’s yearly checkup and is a great way for PTs to detect and treat anxiety that could negatively impact the PT plan of care. By identifying the presence of anxiety, PTs can help patients overcome it and improve their quality of life. To learn more about the RCMAS-2 or to download it for free, click the link below.