Kids who seem oppositional are often experience severe anxiety
A 10-year-old boy named James has an outburst in school. Upset by something a classmate says to him. He pushes the other boy, and a shoving-match ensues. When the teacher steps in to break it up, James goes ballistic, throwing papers and books around the classroom and bolting out of the room and down the hall. Staff finally contain him in the vice principal’s office. Staff members try to calm him down. Instead, he kicks the vice principal in an effort to escape. The staff calls 911, and James ends up in the Emergency Room.
To most, James looks like a boy with serious anger issues. Unfortunately, this is not the first time. The school insists that his parents pick him up and take him home for lunch every day because he can’t be in the cafeteria.
Unrecognized anxiety
But what’s really going on? “It turns out, after an evaluation, that he is off the charts for social anxiety,” reports Dr. Jerry Bubrick. “He can’t tolerate any—even constructive—criticism. He just will shut down altogether. James is terrified of being embarrassed. When a boy says something that makes him uncomfortable, he has no skills to deal with it, and he freaks out. Flight or fight.”
James’s story illustrates something that parents and teachers may not realize. Disruptive behavior is often comes from unrecognized anxiety. A child who appears to be oppositional or aggressive may be reacting to anxiety. He may, depending on his age, not be able to articulate effectively, or recognize that he’s feeling.
“Especially in younger kids with anxiety you might see freezing and clinging kind of behavior.” “But you can also see tantrums and complete meltdowns.”
A great masquerader
Anxiety manifests in a surprising variety of ways in part because it is based on a physiological response to a threat in the environment, a response that maximizes the body’s ability to either face danger or escape danger. So while some children exhibit anxiety by shrinking from situations or objects that trigger fears, some react with overwhelming need to break out of an uncomfortable situation. That behavior, which can be unmanageable, is often misread as anger or opposition.
“Anxiety is one of those diagnoses that is a great masquerader” explains Dr. Laura Prager. Laura is the director of the Child Psychiatry Emergency Service at Massachusetts General Hospital. “It can look like a lot of things. Particularly with kids who may not have words to express their feelings. If no one is listening to them, they might manifest their anxiety with behavioral dysregulation.”
The more commonly recognized symptoms of anxiety in a child are things like trouble sleeping in his own room or separating from his parents. Further, avoidance of certain activities or a behaviorally inhibited temperament. “Anyone would recognize those symptoms,” notes Dr. Prager. But in other cases the anxiety can be hidden.
“When the chief complaint is temper tantrums, or disruption in school, or throwing themselves on the floor while shopping at the mall, it’s hard to know what it means,” she explains. “But it’s not uncommon, when kids like that come in to the ER, for the diagnosis to end up being a pretty profound anxiety disorder.”
To demonstrate the surprising range of ways young children express anxiety, Dr. Prager mentions a case she had just seen of a young child who presented with hallucinations. But whose diagnosis she predicted will end up being somewhere on the anxiety spectrum. “Little kids who say they’re hearing things or seeing things, for example, may or may not be doing that. These may not be the frank hallucinations we see in older patients who are schizophrenic. They might be a manifestation of anxiety and this is the way the child expresses it.”
Problems at school
It’s not uncommon for children with serious undiagnosed anxiety to be disruptive at school. The demands and expectations put pressure on them that they can’t handle. It can be very confusing to teachers and other staff members to “read” that behavior. These behaviors can seem to come out of nowhere.
Dr. Nancy Rappaport, who specializes in mental health care in school settings, sees anxiety as one of the causes of disruptive behavior that makes teaching so challenging. “The trouble is that when kids who are anxious become disruptive they push away the very adults who they need to help them feel secure.” “And instead of learning to manage their anxiety, they end up spending half the day in the principal’s office.”
Dr. Rappaport sees a lot of acting out in school as the result of trauma at home. “Kids who are struggling, not feeling safe at home, can act like terrorists at school. They can display fairly intimidating kinds of behavior.” Most at risk are kids with ADHD who’ve also experienced trauma. “They’re hyper-vigilant, they have no executive functioning, they misread cues and go into combat.”
Giving kids tools to handle anxiety
When a teacher is able to build a relationship with a child, to find out what’s really going on, she can often give him tools to handle anxiety and prevent meltdowns. In her book, The Behavior Code: A Practical Guide to Understanding and Teaching the Most Challenging Students, Dr. Rappaport offers strategies kids can be taught to calm themselves down. Everything from breathing exercises to techniques for distracting themselves.
If it sounds labor-intensive for the teacher, it is, she notes, but so is dealing with the aftermath of the same child having a meltdown.
Anxiety confused with ADHD
Anxiety also drives a lot of symptoms in a school setting that are easily misconstrued as ADHD or defiant behavior.
“I’ll see a child who’s having difficulty in school: not paying attention, getting up out of his seat all the time, asking a lot of questions, going to the bathroom a lot, getting in other kids’ spaces,” explains Dr. Busman. “His behavior is disrupting other kids, and is frustrating to the teacher, who’s wondering why she has to answer so many questions. And why he’s so wrapped up in what other kids are doing, whether they’re following the rules.”
People tend to assume what’s happening with this child is ADHD inattentive type. It’s commonly anxiety. Kids with OCD, mislabeled as inattentive, are actually not asking all those questions because they’re not listening, but rather because they need a lot of reassurance.
How to identify anxiety
It probably occurs more than we think. Either anxiety that looks disruptive or anxiety coexisting with disruptive behaviors. “It all goes back to the fact that kids are complex and symptoms can overlap diagnostic categories. This is why we need to have really comprehensive and good diagnostic assessment.”
First of all, good assessment needs to gather data from multiple sources, not just parents. “We want to talk to teachers and other people involved with the kid’s life.” “Sometimes kids that we see are exactly the same at home and at school and sometimes they are like two different children.”
And it needs to use rating scales on a full spectrum of behaviors, not just the area that looks the most obvious, to avoid missing things.
Dr. Busman also notes that a child with severe anxiety who’s struggling in school might also have attentional or learning issues. They might need to be treated for the anxiety before they can really be evaluated for those. She uses the example of a teenager with OCD who she’s “doing terribly” in school. “She’s ritualizing three to four hours a day, and having constant intrusive thoughts—so we need to treat that, to get the anxiety under control before we ask, how is she learning?”
