Parents With Social Anxiety Have Anxious Children

According to a recent study, researchers found that parent who suffer from social anxiety disorder are more likely to have anxious children of their own when compared to parents with other anxiety disorder.

Researchers from Johns Hopkins Children's Center conducted a small study on the parent-child relationship and found that parent who have social anxiety disorder are more likely to pass on the disorder to their own children when compared to parents with other anxiety disorder.

Though similar studies have been conducted in the past, it has, until this study, remained unclear if there is a certain type of anxiety that causes more anxiety in children whose parents suffer from the disorder. Through this study, it was found that social anxiety is one of the main types of this disorder that is likely to be passed on to children.

"There is a broad range of anxiety disorders so what we did was home in on social anxiety, and we found that anxiety-promoting parental behaviors may be unique to the parent's diagnosis and not necessarily common to all those with anxiety," says study senior investigator, Golda Ginsburg, Ph.D., a child anxiety expert at Johns Hopkins Children's Center and professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at The Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

Researchers claim that though the study didn't directly examine if the anxiety in the parents are passed on to their children, several evidence through the course of the study was found to be true. Therefore, researchers have cautioned doctors to take precautions and be alert on what effect the treatment they are giving to parents with anxiety disorder will have on their offspring.

"Parental social anxiety should be considered a risk factor for childhood anxiety, and physicians who care for parents with this disorder would be wise to discuss that risk with their patients," said Ginsburg.

"Children with an inherited propensity to anxiety do not just become anxious because of their genes, so what we need are ways to prevent the environmental catalysts - in this case, parental behaviors - from unlocking the underlying genetic mechanisms responsible for the disease," Ginsburg says.