Introduction
Psychotherapy and counseling are practices aimed at improving a client’s well-being with problems such as depression or anxiety. They are conducted via communication to elucidate issues such as inconsistencies between emotions, thoughts, and behavior, and then reflect on them and resolve them, making emotions, thoughts, and behavior consistent. Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBP) is aimed at this purpose, being a robust tool for treating anxiety and depression, which are especially detrimental for young people who lose their desire to study and live. A counselor must have various skills to help clients solve their inner issues successfully.
Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is based on managing connections between a client’s thoughts, behavior, and emotions, leading to normalizing their life. It is considered one of the most valuable and well-defined theories for modern psychotherapy in general and is recommended for use by psychotherapists and counselors (Jones-Smith, 2021).
The therapy works with three components: cognitive, emotional, and behavioral, observing when a balance between them is violated and how it can be restored (Kazantzis et al., 2018). Therapists identify how a client’s emotions and thoughts are disconnected from their behavior, leading to problems, and how they can be successfully treated. Child anxiety is a significant and widespread problem that decreases their well-being, leads to school avoidance, and increases stress levels. This essay will evaluate whether CBT can be used to treat this issue efficiently.
Anxiety in Children
Anxiety is a common symptom for school-age children and teens and, as mentioned, can cause many problems. Almost 8% of children and teens worldwide suffer from various anxiety syndromes, and many more experience anxiety episodes in general (Hill et al., 2018). Children with anxiety have problems with sleep, mood, school education, and asocial behavior and usually cannot live a full life as they want (Silk et al., 2016).
School avoidance is a frequent consequence of child and youth anxiety, as they feel unsafe in school and try to avoid visiting it (Elliott & Place, 2017). In addition to school avoidance, children with anxiety tend to avoid the real world in general, being susceptible to various addictions. Therefore, children’s anxiety leads to many problems that decrease their cognitive abilities and worsen their lives.
Causes of Anxiety
Anxiety has various reasons and causes, but the widespread anxiety in the modern world can be associated with a high level of distractions. Social network usage, informational overdose, and exposure to explicit content all of these factors lead to child anxiety, as children face information that hurts them emotionally (Abu-Taieh et al., 2022). Personal problems, such as obesity, often lead to depression and anxiety, as teens feel uncomfortable, hesitate, and worry about their personal looks and malfunctions (Lindberg et al., 2020).
Mental issues, such as autistic spectrum disorders, can be a firm ground for anxiety development, and these children are at special risk. Child maltreatment, especially neglect, sexual, and physical abuse, significantly increases it, as a kid feels unprotected and offended by those whom they trusted most, their parents (Gardner et al., 2019). In addition, COVID-19 and the home isolation caused by it increased child anxiety levels several times (Kılınçel et al., 2020). Therefore, anxiety can be caused and enhanced by information overdose, explicit content availability, a lack of trust and care, maltreatment, and the presence of chronic physical and mental illnesses.
Implications of Anxiety
As mentioned, anxiety causes many personal and educational problems, being detrimental to mental health, decreasing well-being, and leading to school avoidance. If children are full of stress and feel that they can experience even more stress and pain in school, it is natural that they will try to avoid this place (Elliott & Place, 2017). It leads to them being unable to learn how to live in the world, work, and earn money, leaving them unprotected and decreasing their chances of thriving well-being in the future (Keles & Idsoe, 2018).
A robust psychotherapeutic technique is necessary to help children with anxiety feel better, reducing their fears and returning them to school without coercion. Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) can be such a tool, as it is a well-developed psychology system with a solid scientific basis: its efficiency will be evaluated below.
Using Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to Treat Anxiety
CBT can help young people feel better and solve anxiety, eliminating the problem of their school avoidance and decreasing cognitive skills. As practice shows, CBT is highly efficient in treating depression and symptoms similar to those in young people 13 â 18, including group sessions (Keles & Idsoe, 2018).
As mentioned, anxiety is a stress-related disorder caused by high overloads and enhanced by other mental issues. CBT works with teens’ thoughts and behaviors, helping them understand how to manage them in various conditions (Curtiss et al., 2021). Mindfulness techniques can be used along with CBT to improve children’s awareness, while pharmacotherapy is usually abundant despite improving outcomes in some instances.
Approaches to Conducting Therapy
Internet-Based Psychotherapy
Psychotherapy can be conducted via the Internet (iCBT) or face-to-face: iCBT can be helpful for children with anxiety. There is evidence that it is highly efficient, reducing anxiety symptoms and having a long-term effect in most cases (James et al., 2020). Internet-based psychotherapy is more easily accessible and requires no direct visiting of the specialist; thus, it is useful for children who tend to avoid social contact (Hill et al., 2018).
Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions
CBT is good for managing anxiety and depressive disorders, as it provides constant support via messaging services, ensuring that children will receive help when needed and that the effect will be stable (Topooco et al., 2018). If the child or parents cannot or would not use psychotherapy, there is an alternative in the form of Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions (SPACE).
According to Lebowitz et al. (2019), children 7 â 14 years old with anxiety symptoms can recover when intervened by their parents. SPACE is based on reducing parent accommodation and working with negative children’s reactions, such as aggression. While CBT does not show superiority to the SPACE approach, many aspects, such as regulating behavior, are similar to CBT’s practices.
Benefits and Limitations of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
Therefore, CBT shows high efficiency in improving the conditions of children with anxiety in the short term, while the long-term efficiency varies greatly. CBT also shows higher long-term efficiency compared to other intervention techniques, such as child-centered therapy. According to Silk et al. (2016), more than 70% of adolescents in the study fully recovered from their anxiety disorders. Other results, while showing lower numbers, are consistent in general: more than 50% of inclusion anxiety and 60% of principal anxiety disorders were cured, and the anxiety symptoms were highly decreased (Kodal et al., 2018).
iCBT is especially useful for kids with anxiety, as it enables immediate contact via the Internet without the need for them to visit a specialist, and they can obtain help as soon as they need it (Hill et al., 2018). Even though there are analogs that can help with anxiety and school avoidance with similar efficiency, their approaches are mostly based on CBT as well.
While cognitive-behavioral therapy is an efficient approach to helping children resolve anxiety, there are alternative approaches that can have similar efficiency. In addition, while almost all anxiety symptoms are quickly eliminated, the long-term effect is persistent only in 50 â 70% of cases. Further studies and developments are necessary to ensure CBT efficiency; other treatment methods can also be helpful in various conditions (Otte, 2022).
However, CBT is still considered the gold standard of psychotherapy due to its wide scientific and factual basis, which shows that it is actually efficient (David et al., 2018). Many other techniques, including the mentioned SPACE, can be considered based on CBT, as it uses behavioral intervention to change how a kid reacts to the changing environment (Lebowitz et al., 2019). Therefore, despite the mixed long-term effects and the necessity of constant improvement, CBT is a powerful tool for managing anxiety and a strong basis for developing new, even better methods.
Conclusion
To summarize, there are two main points: first, CBT is actually an excellent and efficient tool, and second, more research is necessary to evaluate how anxiety and school refusal develops in children. There are many studies that explore CBT techniques and their implementation and measure their efficiency for anxiety treatment in general and adolescents in particular. They show the therapy’s efficiency and its alternatives, which are usually developed based on cognitive and behavioral interventions used in CBT.
However, there are much fewer studies that show how anxiety develops in children and under which conditions. Only several articles found correlate it with maltreatment and personal problems such as obesity or mental issues. Similarly, anxiety-related school avoidance is the underresearched area, and further studies are necessary to understand how children avoid schools, under which conditions, and how they can be treated to help them without coercion. Thus, CBT can be considered a strong, robust, and efficient tool to solve children’s anxiety problems, and there is plenty of evidence. Along with that, the theme of anxiety roots and school avoidance needs further exploration.
References
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