Researchers are investigating the impact of parental anxiety on children

Parents don’t want their children to end up in danger or trust strangers blindly, but at the same time they want them to explore the world and develop trust in people. So how should they prepare their children for new situations, objects, or strangers?

“This question is also very important from a mental health perspective,” says first author Cosima Nimphy. “Anxiety disorders are among the most common mental disorders in children and adolescents, and children of anxious parents are two to three times more likely to develop them. About a third of these are genetic, but the majority of cases are explained by environmental factors So if we want to prevent the transmission of fear and anxiety through parents, or find strategies to reduce anxiety, we need to discover the mechanisms behind it.”

Find the mechanisms

To find these mechanisms, systematic reviews and meta-analyses of all relevant empirical studies are needed. A team of psychological researchers, led by Evin Aktar, searched the scientific databases, and after a thorough screening of the research focus and methodology, they submitted 18 empirical studies – experimental or observational – in children aged 2.5 to 17 years. a systematic review. a statistical meta-analysis, now published in Clinical review of child and family psychology.

“This number of 18 studies may sound small, but it is sufficient to measure the effect and shows a field of research that is still growing,” says Nimphy. “And the effect turned out to be strong, even after one exposure to verbal threat information from parents.”

The studies involved all examined how parents’ verbal anxiety or fear information about a new person, object, or situation can influence their children’s response to these stimuli. Physiological responses (increased heart rate), behavior (avoidance) and/or cognition (self-reported fear and avoidance by the children) were examined.

This last aspect was over-represented in the studies, “which should be a caveat,” says Nimphy, “because children may say they are scared, but they don’t behave fearfully or avoidantly.”

No significant effect of a parent’s anxiety disorder

The researchers expected that children of parents with anxiety disorders would be more sensitive to their warnings about fearful situations. However, the majority (4 out of 5) of the studies that investigated this found no significant effect.

“This was surprising,” says Nimphy. “But we need more studies than the five that looked at this.” And that doesn’t mean that anxious parents don’t have an influence. Perhaps the repetition of social anxiety learning over time, rather than its intensity, reinforces children’s tendency to avoid novel social stimuli or situations in anxious families.”

No influence from children’s own attitudes

The team also expected that children who already have an anxious disposition would be more sensitive to parental “anxiety talk.” But in 3 of the 4 studies that investigated this, no significant effect was found.

“Rather than making children more sensitive to parental expressions of fear, children with anxious temperaments may exhibit heightened fearful responses independently of parental warnings,” Nimphy notes.

“We expect that children will become less sensitive to information about parental anxiety as they get older,” Nimphy says. “Older children have learned to regulate their emotions better and are influenced by more people, such as their social peers. However, this was not the case. This does not mean that age or social peers do not matter. We need more studies that follow the same child across different ages and contexts.”

Prevention strategies

“My personal message would be a reminder of how powerful parental verbal communication can be, even after a single exposure,” Nimphy concludes. “And for anxious parents, prevention strategies could include psychoeducation or training that targets the number of repeated exposures to parental anxiety expressions.”

The study also made clear that much more empirical research is needed and that some weaknesses need to be overcome. “For example, there is still an overrepresentation of mothers in experimental studies, and an overrepresentation of what we call WEIRD families: Western, well-educated, industrialized, wealthy and democratic. While we know that family interactions and children’s perceptions can differ by cultural background.”

What makes children brave?

In the future, Nimphy wants to gain a better understanding of what kinds of supportive statements or behaviors from parents can reduce anxiety in children. “Future qualitative studies should assess children’s perspectives on what helped them face their fears in the past and what statements from their parents they found encouraging. What made them courageous?”

In 2022, Cosima Nimphy and a team of psychologists led by Evin Akar published a empirical research in the Journal of Adolescence showing that more information about parental threats was associated with greater reported fear of COVID-19 in their children. They also published a meta-analysis on the effect of – non-verbal – parental behavior on babies up to 2.5 years old, which turned out to be small to moderate.

Aktar and Nimphy are currently working on one meta-analysis and two experimental studies, where one parent behaves anxiously and the other does not: “Can a confident response from the other parent reduce the effect?”