What Causes Anxiety in School-age Children?

 By Eshaan Patel

Anxiety is the response of the mind to stressful, potentially dangerous, and unfamiliar situations. It has been widely demonstrated that it is a growing problem among middle school students, as they are required to balance everything from homework to sports to extracurriculars. Anxiety causes many unpleasant symptoms {depression, constant worrying, extreme perfectionism}, however, in this paper, only the causes shall be mentioned. There are many ways in which anxiety can be caused by in middle school students, and these include the fear of publicly doing something wrong, bullying, and general phobias.

To begin with, atelophobia is one of the causes of anxiety in these children. Atelophobia is the fear of making mistakes, especially in public or semi-public environments like a classroom. According to How Anxiety Affects Teenagers by the Child Mind Institute, "the problem [leading to anxiety] could be [that they] worry about being called on randomly by a teacher and making a mistake," going on to state that "[they might] worry that they look wrong, and people will make fun of them [for this]." This shows how the fear of mistake-making causes anxiety by describing how they get self-conscious all of a sudden. In addition to all of this, the fear of making mistakes is related to and is a part of obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), which is when one's brain tells itself that there is always a consistent need for absolute perfection in everything. In summary, the fear of making mistakes and looking bad, especially in front of others, known as "atelophobia", is one of the many causes of anxiety.

Moving on, speaking of the state of one being self-conscious, bullying is also a cause of anxiety in middle schoolers. Bullying is already widely known to abnegate positivity. The article 37% Of People Develop Social Anxiety As A Result Of Bullying by DitchTheLabel.org states that bullying is proven "to have negative effects on the self-esteem and confidence of the person experiencing it too, which simply goes to show how serious the effects of bullying can be." Losing self-esteem and confidence contribute to the progression of atelophobia, and can also cause anthropophobia, which is when one has a fear of people, i.e., a fear of human company due to one being scared of rejection. This would be caused by bullying because others may bully the person bullied for being bullied, which would begin a chain reaction of even more bullying, thus making the student yet even more anthropophobic and anxious. In order to summarize, bullying is another large cause of anxiety in middle school-age children.

Last but not least, one final cause of anxiety can be fears (phobias) of ideas and situations. The suffix -phobia comes from the Greek word φόβος phobosh, which roughly translates to "fear" in its noun form. The US Department of Health and Human Services has an article titled "Phobias" which states that "[a phobia] is a strong, irrational fear of something that poses little or no actual danger," and that there are a large number of "specific phobias." These phobias can be of anything meeting the criteria, including the aforementioned atelophobia and anthropophobia, and unrelated fears such as arachnophobia (the fear of spiders). Moving on, one should imagine another who has the aforementioned arachnophobia, and sleeps in a cellar that has a large number of spiders. The other will most likely be very anxious and construe the situation as "the spider will attack me" in their mind, and this can translate to anxiety and the strong, trembling desire to get away from the specific thing being feared. Overall, phobias or fears are another cause of anxiety in middle-school age children.

In conclusion, there are many ways that anxiety can be caused by in middle-school aged children, and these ways include atelophobia (the fear of mistake-making); bullying, which often causes anthropophobia which leads to anxiety; and fears of things, which are known as phobias. Anxiety is the response given from the mind and body to construe different situations and experiences that are stressful and/or potentially dangerous. To give one final statement, the fear of making mistakes, along with bullying, are all contributors to the progression of anxiety.

Works Cited

Ditch the Label Staff. “37% of People Develop Social Anxiety as a Result of Bullying.” Ditch the Label, 3 Dec. 2020, www.ditchthelabel.org/social-anxiety-bullying. Accessed 21 Feb. 2023.

“How Anxiety Affects Teenagers.” Child Mind Institute, 5 Jan. 2023, childmind.org/article/signs-of-anxiety-in-teenagers. Accessed 21 Feb. 2023.

“Phobias.” MentalHealth.gov, 1 Mar. 2022, www.mentalhealth.gov:443/what-to-look-for/anxiety-disorders/phobias. Accessed 21 Feb. 2023.