• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

FHE Health | Inpatient Rehab & Mental Health Facility in Florida Homepage

Drug, Alcohol and Mental Health Treatment

ContactCareers

Call for Immediate Help (833) 596-3502

MENUMENU
  • About
        • About FHE Rehab
          • About FHE Health
          • Our Staff
          • Locations We Serve
          • Testimonials
        • Our Campus
          • Gallery
          • Our Videos
          • The Health and Wellness Center at FHE Health
        • Our Locations
          • Alcohol Rehab
          • Detox Center
          • Drug Rehab
          • Mental Health Center
          • Outpatient Rehab
        • Careers at FHE Health
          • Employment Opportunities
        • Our Expertise
          • Accreditations
          • Educational Opportunities
          • Community Impact Award
          • First Responder Families Podcast
          • First Responder Paws
          • Education Scholarship
  • Addiction
        • Treatment Programs
          • Treatment Program Overview
          • Alcohol Addiction
          • Drug Addiction Treatment
          • Behavioral Addiction
        • Levels of Care
          • Continuum of Care
          • Addiction Detox
          • Inpatient Addiction Treatment
          • Outpatient Addiction Treatment
        • What We Treat
          • Alcoholism
          • Amphetamines
          • Benzodiazepines
          • Cocaine
          • Heroin
          • Opioids
          • Sedative
  • Mental Health
        • Mental Health Rehab
          • Mental Health Rehab
          • Onsite Psychiatric Care
          • Dual Diagnosis
        • Levels of Care
          • Residential Mental Health Care
          • Outpatient Mental Health Care
        • What We Treat
          • ADD & ADHD
          • Anxiety Disorders
          • Bipolar Disorder
          • Depression
          • Eating Disorders
          • Personality Disorders
          • PTSD
          • Schizophrenia
          • Substance Use Disorder
          • Trauma
  • Programs
        • FHE Programs
          • Specialty Program Overview
          • Restore (Mental Health)
          • Empower! (Women's Program)
          • Shatterproof FHE Health(First Responders)
          • Compass Program
        • Support Programs
          • Alumni
          • Family Support
        • Therapies
          • Acupuncture
          • Breathwork Therapy
          • CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy)
          • DBT (Dialectical Behavioral Therapy)
          • EMDR Therapy
          • Expressive Arts Therapy
          • Individual Therapy
          • Group Therapy
          • Gambling Therapy
          • Massage
        • Medical Care
          • Medical Integration
          • Ketamine Infusion
          • IV Vitamin
          • Fitness & Nutrition
          • Medication-Assisted Treatment
          • Medication Management
        • NeuroRehab Services
          • Neuro Rehabilitation
          • Neurofeedback Training
          • Neurostimulation Therapy
          • EEG Brain Mapping
          • Insomnia Treatment for PTSD
  • Resources
        • FHE Guides
          • Understanding Drug Abuse
          • Signs of Addiction
          • The Disease of Addiction
          • Confronting Addiction
          • Staging an Intervention
          • Rehab Success Rate – Does It Really Work?
          • Withdrawal Timelines
          • Life After Rehab
          • LGBTQ+ Community Resources
          • Veteran Resources
          • FHE Podcasts
          • Remote Resources Toolkit
        • Learning Center
          • Help for You
          • Help For Loved Ones
          • Help For Alcoholism
          • Help With Substance Abuse
          • Behavioral & Mental Health
          • Life in Recovery
          • Rehab Explained
          • Addiction Statistics
          • Our Research Articles
          • View All Articles
        • The Experience Blog
          • Addiction News
          • Alumni
          • Community Events
          • Expert Opinions
          • FHE Commentary
          • FHE News
          • Treatment Legislation
          • View All Articles
  • Admissions
        • Insurance
          • Blue Cross Insurance
          • Beacon Health / Value Options Insurance
          • Cigna Insurance
          • Humana Insurance
          • TRICARE Insurance
        • Admissions
          • Steps to Addiction Help
          • Will Insurance Cover Behavioral Treatment?
          • Self-Pay Rehab
        • FAQ
          • Keeping Your Job in Rehab
          • Example Day in Rehab
        • Contact Admissions
          • Contact Us
          • Secure Payment Form
  • Contact
  •  
Home > Learning > Behavioral & Mental Health > Growing Up with a Parent with Anxiety Disorder

May 29, 2021 By Chris Foy

Growing Up with a Parent with Anxiety Disorder

Parental Anxiety Disorder's Impact on Kids

As a child, growing up with a parent with anxiety disorder can be a challenging experience. You may not understand why you got in trouble for doing something that seemed harmless.

You may have been on the receiving end of anger or a frustrated outburst that resulted from your parent’s anxiety. Perhaps your parent also struggled with depression and some days, they simply didn’t get up or care for you as they would normally.

While you may not have recognized what you were dealing with at the time, as you grow up, the effects of that early childhood trauma may manifest in other ways. Dealing with these childhood experiences may require you to seek help with your own mental health.

Childhood With a Depressed or Anxious Parent

Growing up with a parent who’s struggling with anxiety or depression can be a challenging and life-altering experience. As a child, having an anxious parent can affect you in many ways, depending on the type of anxiety your parent deals with.

A parent who suffers from generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) might catastrophize situations to an unrealistic level, inducing anxiety in you, the child, as a result of this reaction.

Kids who grow up with a parent who deals with social anxiety may have their social skills affected from a young age. A lack of socialization can have a major impact on a child growing up. This is especially true if the parent isn’t making active attempts to step outside their own comfort zone and engage in social activities for the benefit of their child.

Parents with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) may experience bouts of rage, anger or intense nightmares that can be emotionally distressing for a child to witness.

Children dealing with a depressed parent may not understand why their mother or father seems detached, tired or sad all the time. They may feel neglected if the depression affects the parents to the degree that they’re struggling to take care of anyone but themselves.

What Does Anxiety Look Like?

An anxiety disorder can take many forms. Anxiety in a parent might display as:

  • Being restless or tense
  • Creating a sense of impending danger or doom
  • Feeling exhausted frequently
  • Having difficulty concentrating on anything besides their fears
  • Hyperventilating
  • Bursts of annoyance or frustration
  • Periods of silence or distraction

Anxiety can be different for everyone, and symptoms vary depending on the type of anxiety disorder a person is dealing with.

Long-Term Effects of Having a Parent With Anxiety Disorder

So if the effects of having an anxious parent are difficult as a child, how do they affect the individual in the long term? Unfortunately, growing up with a parent with an anxiety disorder can have a lasting impact on your life.

A study conducted at King’s College London found that anxiety isn’t passed genetically between generations but manifests in kids based on the environment they’re raised in. When a parent reacts to certain situations with anxiety or indicates there’s a reason to be fearful of something unusual, it makes an impression on a child’s mind.

Even if the child grows up to be unafraid of the same things, they may still experience anxiety in another capacity. For example, the child of a parent with GAD might experience social anxiety.

Children of anxious mothers are also twice as likely to experience hyperactivity in adolescence. And according to the CDC, 7.1% of children in America between the ages of 3 and 17 have been diagnosed with anxiety.

How Parents Can Help Their Kids

If you’re a parent and aware that you’re dealing with anxiety, there’s no reason to panic about instilling permanent emotional trauma in your child. The fact that you’re cognizant of your anxiety and want to avoid passing those thought patterns on to your offspring is the first step. The most practical way for anxious parents to avoid passing fears and habits on to their kids is by attending therapy.

Counseling or therapy sessions can make you aware of your behaviors, thoughts, and reactions to situations. When you become aware of them, you can work on changing these patterns for the betterment of your own mental health. By doing so, you’ll ensure the way you handle a situation isn’t based on an anxious reaction that has negative repercussions for your kids.

Resolving Childhood Trauma

If you’re now coming to terms with how an anxious parent may have impacted your own mental health, there are a number of options available to you. Counseling, cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), exposure therapy and medication are just a few of the treatment methods available for anxiety. By taking time to work through how this childhood trauma affected you, it’s possible to prevent it from becoming more of an issue in the future.

Besides professional treatment, there are some other healthy methods for coping with anxiety you can try. Meditation, yoga, breathing exercises and acupuncture can all help you get out of your head and tune into your body. This can help you learn to focus on the present moment rather than living in the future or past.

Seeking Help Is Always an Option

Whether you’re a parent with anxiety or you grew up with a parent who had anxiety, it’s time to break the cycle. As a parent, by taking part in talk therapy, you can identify your patterns and work on changing them. If you’re now dealing with anxiety as a result of your upbringing, there are plenty of ways we can help.

At FHE, our team of compassionate counselors is ready to support you in your mental health journey so you can manage your anxiety in a healthy way and enjoy your life to the fullest. Contact us today at (833) 596-3502 to learn about our anxiety and depression treatment solutions. We’re standing by to take your call 24/7.

Filed Under: Behavioral & Mental Health, Featured in Mental Health

About Chris Foy

Chris Foy is a content manager and webmaster for FHE Health with years of experience in the addiction treatment industry...read more

Primary Sidebar

Learning Center

  • Help for You
  • Help For Loved Ones
  • Help For Alcoholism
  • Help With Substance Abuse
  • Behavioral & Mental Health
  • Life in Recovery
  • Rehab Explained
  • All Articles

Sign up for the Blog

Our Facilities

Take a look at our state of the art treatment center.

View Our Gallery

The Experience Blog

  • Addiction News
  • Alumni
  • Community Events
  • Expert Columns
  • FHE Commentary
  • FHE News
  • Treatment Legislation
  • All Articles

Footer

FHE Health

© 2025 FHE Health

505 S Federal Hwy #2,
Deerfield Beach, Florida 33441
1-833-596-3502
youtube facebook instagram linkedin twitter
  • Contact
  • Careers
  • AI Policy
  • Privacy Policy
  • Sitemap
A+ BBB and Top Places to Work - Sun Sentinel

Copyright © 2025 · FHE Theme On Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in

Manage Consent
To provide the best experiences, we use technologies like cookies to store and/or access device information. Consenting to these technologies will allow us to process data such as browsing behavior or unique IDs on this site. Not consenting or withdrawing consent, may adversely affect certain features and functions.
Functional Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes. The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
Manage options Manage services Manage {vendor_count} vendors Read more about these purposes
View preferences
{title} {title} {title}

The FHE Health team is committed to providing accurate information that adheres to the highest standards of writing. If one of our articles is marked with a ‘reviewed for accuracy and expertise’ badge, it indicates that one or more members of our team of doctors and clinicians have reviewed the article further to ensure accuracy. This is part of our ongoing commitment to ensure FHE Health is trusted as a leader in mental health and addiction care.

If there are any concerns about content we have published, please reach out to us at marketing@fhehealth.com.

833-596-3502

Text/Call Me