Showing posts with label Recognizing Anxiety In Teens. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Recognizing Anxiety In Teens. Show all posts

Monday, October 15, 2018

Fear Of Failure Causes Anxiety + #MyPostMonday The Week's Best Original Content

This past September was National Suicide Prevention Month. I, like too many others, have had personal experiences where suicide has touched me personally, or has been way too close for comfort. 

But I've had far more experiences where, although no suicide was involved, the impact of stress and anxiety have affected lives and could easily have ended in suicide. These are stories about teen anxiety that need to be told in the hopes that we can start to recognize and prevent what could happen later on.

In my 9 years of working within the school system, I have been close enough to teens to see what motivates them. I have followed some of their lives and have somewhat of a sense of what can make a teen feel pressure, anxiety, worry, and the need to fight or take flight! I will be sharing one story now and more later about some things that definitely make a teenager anxious and feel stress. Maybe if we can recognize some of these situations, we can be of help!


Fear Of Failure
I knew A. when she came to our unit fresh from a detention center.  She was smart, but had decided that school was not the way she would be successful....

Something that filled her with anxiety and dread was math. At some point along the way, someone or something had convinced her that she couldn't understand or do it. At all. In anticipation of math, she would begin to hyperventilate and would start to panic. The only way she could get through a math lesson was if she had someone right there helping her through ALL the problems, which doesn't happen often in a busy classroom. More often than not she would refuse to work, throw her materials, and leave the room with angry words hurled at whoever happened to be around. Gradually, she was able to get help and encouragement. She learned to retain some of the things she was being taught and she became more confident, thus feeling less stress when she was asked to do math problems on the board or at her desk. She got the assistance she needed that year because she made it crystal clear about how she felt about math and, luckily, there was someone available who was willing to work with her. 

Not all kids are able to verbalize their fear and trepidation when they run into academic hurdles. Sometimes they will take the fail, rather than turn attention on themselves and their problems. Unlike A. they are not squeaky wheels that will get the grease!
 Today is "My Post Monday!", a curation of the week's best original content. It's all about posts from Crafts to Camping, Wellness to Wealth, Fashion to Food, and whatever else is on the brain!  I  open up with a post of my own and then follow it up with a linky of the week's top original blog posts! It's all about what the writer thinks, believes, and knows--in other words, they are active, writing blogs. If I happen to find a great original, non-sponsored post, I'll link it up and share it with you here and on Twitter via the #MyPostMonday hashtag!  I can miss some amazing posts, but I don't want to!  So, in addition, if you'd like to link up yourself, you can do that too!  I'll visit your site, comment, promote and publicize(Affiliate links welcome)