More Common than you Think: Learning Disorders & Anxiety

Often times, children with learning difficulties experience heightened symptoms of anxiety. The academic struggles combined with (real or imagined) social, emotional, or behavioral fears can become debilitating for a child. As a parent, it is hard to see your child suffering academically, emotionally, and socially. Therefore, gaining a better understanding of the connection between learning disorders and anxiety is a vital step in aiding your child and increasing their confidence and overall ability.

To start, let’s define some terms.

What are Learning Disorders?
Learning disorders, or LDs for short, refer to a group of diagnoses where a child faces difficulties in reading, writing, and/or math. LDs are typically noticed and effect a child around grade-school age. As academic demands increase, the child tends to face more and more difficulty. Some signs of LDs to look out for include:

·      A decrease in academic motivation

·      An increase in irritability due to frustration with an academic task

·      An increase in exhaustion because the child is using up more mental energy to complete academic tasks

·      The effort put in does not match the work outcome

·      Expressing embarrassment because the child is not achieving at the same rate as their classmates

What is Anxiety?
Anxiety a refers to thoughts and feelings of worry, fear or unease. Typically, these fears are related to future uncertain outcomes and a lack of confidence in how one can cope with that uncertainty. Many children with anxiety will avoid certain tasks or events, procrastinate, experience psychosomatic symptoms (i.e. headache, bellyache). 

How do Anxiety and LD’s Relate/ Overlap?
As mentioned, LDs often co-occur with social-emotional concerns, such as anxiety. You may ask, “Why?” Well, when children suffer to keep up with their classwork, they may become easily frustrated. These children also have a hard time paying attention for a whole lesson. Many of kids with learning needs also take in and process information slower and retrieve that information slower too. So, when teachers are talking, these children are making sense of the information at a slower rate than the teacher is talking. By the time these students makes sense of what was just said, the teacher already moved on and these kids may have missed other vital information. Because they missed so much information, disengagement from the lesson will likely occur because they are already so behind and “lost.” It only takes a few times of feeling “lost” to give up completely because the content is “too hard.”

Anxiety arises due to these frustrations and uncertainties and kids with anxiety often go down the “worry hole,” where one worry turns into another worry. Suddenly, the initial worry is forgotten and they’ve moved on to something more cumbersome that feels impossible to face. It could sound like this: It starts with frustration that they cannot keep up and that they missed so much information. They then begin to worry if they will be able to keep up with other classmates and succeed, academically and socially. These worries can grow into concerns that they are stupid and cannot accomplish certain expected tasks, feeling inadequate and incapable. They may also worry that they cannot complete tasks at the same rate and/or quality as other students. Students with LDs may therefore, feel different than their peers and are often embarrassed of their academic difficulties. Feelings of embarrassment leads to heightened performance anxieties and heightened fear of negative judgments. Such worry lowers a child’s self-esteem, which in turn creates social concerns for the child. This can decrease self-confidence and lead to struggles with peer relationships and socialization. It can feel unreasonable, yet overwhelming to follow this train and it is often what kids with learning needs do, all while trying to learn new information. 

In essence, anxiety becomes a cloud that hangs over learning expectations that is difficult to ignore. Because anxious kids are so consumed and overwhelmed by their fears of being ‘stupid’ or being judged, their minds are less capable of attending to other pieces of information. Achievement is impacted heavily, as the brain is using so much energy focusing on all of the worries, leaving less energy to focus on academic work and take in academic information.

How can you help as a parent?
As a parent, there are many ways to support your child with learning difficulties and related anxieties. To start, do not assume that your child is not trying hard enough! Oftentimes your child is trying, they just can’t perform at grade-expected levels and the anxiety of this struggle impacts their performance further. Validate your child’s experience and praise their effort. Help your child feel understood and seen. If you have concerns about their learning needs, seek an evaluation to better understand where the weaknesses lie and obtain the right supports for your unique child.

Reach out to our team for additional support if you are noticing your child is struggling to keep up academically and is exhibiting anxiety around peer relationships and schoolwork. We can guide you towards an evaluation to better understand your child’s academic needs.