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Is Your Child Anxious? NPR Wants To Hear Your Story

NPR

Anxiety is a natural part of growing up, but it can be hard for parents to know when a child's worries are appropriate and when something bigger is going on.

Too much anxiety can hold children back, experts say, and it can leave parents feeling confused and anxious themselves. For example, some children are so afraid of the dark that they won't sleep alone, so bothered by dogs that they'll skip a play date, or so nervous about school that they simply refuse to go.

NPR's Life Kit wants to hear your stories — and questions — and about your child's anxious behavior and how you've tried to handle it.

Just fill out the form at this link.

If we end up using your story in the podcast, you'll get guidance from experts who've dedicated their careers to studying anxiety in children. You do not have to share your child's name.

Part of this project involves putting voices on air, so we'd love it if you could send us a voice memo. You can submit a voice memo within the form. Thanks!

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Anya Kamenetz is an education correspondent at NPR. She joined NPR in 2014, working as part of a new initiative to coordinate on-air and online coverage of learning. Since then the NPR Ed team has won a 2017 Edward R. Murrow Award for Innovation, and a 2015 National Award for Education Reporting for the multimedia national collaboration, the Grad Rates project.
Cory Turner reports and edits for the NPR Ed team. He's helped lead several of the team's signature reporting projects, including "The Truth About America's Graduation Rate" (2015), the groundbreaking "School Money" series (2016), "Raising Kings: A Year Of Love And Struggle At Ron Brown College Prep" (2017), and the NPR Life Kit parenting podcast with Sesame Workshop (2019). His year-long investigation with NPR's Chris Arnold, "The Trouble With TEACH Grants" (2018), led the U.S. Department of Education to change the rules of a troubled federal grant program that had unfairly hurt thousands of teachers.