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Childhood Anxiety Disorders : Is The Role Of Fathers Been Underestimated?

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The research article written by Juliette M. Liber, Brigit M. van Widenfelt, and Arnold W. Goedhart, et.al, Parenting and Parental Anxiety and Depression as Predictors of Treatment Outcome for Childhood Anxiety Disorders: Has the Role of Fathers Been Underestimated? Gives a hypothesis from previous researches that had been done that childhood anxiety disorders led to adult anxiety disorders and that many children aren’t responding to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, (CBT). Based off of previous research it has been suggested that there is a link between parenting styles and anxiety in children. It has also been suggested that parental depressive symptoms have a significant predicting factor that treatment would fail later in the study. There …show more content…

Kids that had been chosen either had separation anxiety disorder (SAD), generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), social phobia (SOP), or specific phobia (SP). However if the child had an IQ of eighty-five or below they were excluded from the research, other exclusions included that the child must have a good command in Dutch language, must not have any serious diseases or substance abuses disorders, or psychotic disorders. Also children with OCD and panic disorders were excluded because CBT does not normally help these problems anyway. The final subjects consisted of one hundred and forty-two children, ages eight to twelve with anxiety disorders, one hundred twenty-three mothers and one hundred and eight fathers.
Getting into the process of how the research was done the kids was given FRIENDS program, which is a workbook that targets three areas: physical symptoms, cognitive processes, and coping skills. Kids were taught relaxation techniques, positive self-talk and coping/problem solving skills. After this fears were explored in more depth gradually and with attempts to handle these fears a positive reward was given. The FRIENDS treatment was made up of ten weekly sessions for kids in groups and done also individually. The parents had only four sessions focusing on psychoeducation. The measures that were used consisted of Anxiety Disorders Interview Schedule (ADIS) in a parent and child version done at both pre and post treatment. Multidimensional Anxiety Scale for

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