It can be heart breaking when seeing your child or preteen getting so stressed out about school. Test anxiety can be extremely frustrating, and often is too much for a child. Often the child knows the content for the test, but then wants to do such a good job that they get overwhelmed and don't perform as well as they should have. Usually, we are trying to differentiate between a learning disability and test anxiety to see if this is due to difficulties with abilities, or whether its anxiety. Often, kids, teens, and adults with test anxiety are able to do well with their work, but in a testing situation, their performance drops. Sometimes perfectionism stresses the child out so much they don't even do the work, or take so long doing the work that they are miserable. Many with test anxiety start to feel anxious, think, "oh no, this is really bad, I'm not going to do well, I can't do this", and their anxiety spirals, and affects the way they perform on tests.
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Symptoms of Test Anxiety:
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Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is very effective in treating test anxiety. The child learns how to manage their physiological reactions, refocus their attention, and use cognitive techniques to build their confidence and decrease the pressure. They learn how to identify the "anxiety" or "worry", and fight against it so that it doesn't make them feel bad and get in the way of them doing their best in school. We teach parents the CBT techniques also, so they can reinforce the work at home and help the kids overcome anxiety.
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