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Childhood Stress and Anxiety

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Submitted By louisaabaird
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Task 2: Describe conditions that affect the behaviour of children
AO2 Childhood Stress and Anxiety
What is stress and anxiety?
Both adults and children can suffer from stress and anxiety. It is important to remember that just because someone may be small or young it doesn’t mean that they don’t have the same feeling as adults do. Children can experience all sorts of strong feelings about what is happening to them. Therefore it is natural for some children to suffer from anxiety and stress.
Young children will be experiencing a lot of new things in their lives such as leaving their parents for the first time, starting nursery and school, having to make new friends, being in new environments, learning to trust people who aren’t their parents, learning new skills such as speaking, walking and toilet training. These can all become stressful times for children. In some circumstances it can be made even worse by having parents who are arguing or going through a divorce. This can cause a lot of stress on the child and the parents may not even know the true affect that the circumstances are having on the child. Also a death of a family member or friend can cause a lot of stress on a child.
When someone is stressed then this can also lead to having anxiety problems as well. This means that when someone is stressed they may have feelings of anxiety. Anxiety is defined as ‘apprehension without apparent cause’ this means that anxiety can occur even when there is no immediate threat. Anxiety often causes people to feel like they want to get away; this is known as fight or fight. Anxiety makes the heart beat quickly, you can start to sweat and you may have the feeling of having ‘butterflies’ in your stomach. For some people having a bit of anxiety can help them to focus and stay alert.
Very young children often suffer from fears and phobias. Often they are related to the

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