Many exhibited physical symptoms as well. Symptoms such as:
- Stomach aches, nausea, headaches, or vomiting
- Bedwetting
- Unusual heavy or light sleeping
- Unusual sweating
The trouble here, beyond the fact that these children have to experience this, is that it will dramatically worsen the learning problem. When there are anxiety issues, this leads to the higher processing centers of the brain actually shutting down. Which makes learning academics nearly impossible. This starts a downward spiral. Learning difficulties lead to anxiety. Anxiety leads to more learning difficulties. And so on. And so on. Until the child finally just gives up entirely. It's not a story with a happy ending.
What happens is that the symptom actually becomes the bigger problem. Because anxiety can decrease learning ability dramatically. The anxiety itself becomes the bigger problem. The difficulties caused by anxiety far out shadow the difficulties caused by a specific learning disability. Both emotionally and academically.
This anxiety can spiral out of control. Causing more and more learning challenges. Causing more and more bad behavior and making everything far more difficult. Soon the effects of anxiety are a far bigger issue than anything else. Performance will suffer, and even worse, learned helplessness can creep in.
That’s why we always recommend that, when there is a learning struggle you start with confidence building first. Get your child past their anxiety. Help them develop a growth mindset. Once you’ve done that, then start working on the underlying problem. That gets them ready to tackle academics. That’s precisely the path that the Learning Success system takes.
More academics is not the solution. That just makes the emotional problem worse. Prepare them for academics and you’ll have a much better result and your child won’t have to suffer.
Anxiety is fear felt in the body. Once you help them build confidence they won’t have fear. Confidence is the opposite of fear. So build confidence and anxiety fades.
Once your child builds a growth mindset, then they will realize that mistakes are not only a part of the learning process but also a necessary part. They’ll no longer get emotional over mistakes because they’ll know that’s just part of the game. And more importantly, they’ll no longer fear mistakes. Their fear is at the root of all of their avoidance behaviors. Get rid of that and the behaviors just fade away.
And once you build up the underlying cognitive micro-skills then academics will come easier. Learning will accelerate.