Separation Anxiety Disorder

What is Separation Anxiety?

All children go through a period in which they fear being separated from their parents.  However, when this fear is no longer developmentally appropriate it becomes Separation Anxiety Disorder.

Children with Separation Anxiety Disorder experience anxiety and distress when separated (or think of separating) from an attachment figure.  Younger children are often unable to articulate their reason for their distress. Older children often worry that their parents will be hurt in an accident, get sick, or that they themselves will be come lost or kidnapped, never to be reunited with their parents. As a result they will often refuse to go anywhere without their parents, including to school, social or family events, or even be at home in a different room away from their parents. Children may report feeling sick as a way to avoid separating from their parents. Children with separation anxiety often have difficulty going to sleep alone and experience nightmares.

While separation anxiety is most common in mid-childhood, adolescents and adults may also experience Separation Anxiety Disorder.

How is Separation Anxiety Disorder treated?

In children, treatment of Separation Anxiety Disorder involves both the child and his or her parents.  Initial sessions are held with both the child and parents and involve cognitive techniques to help the child deal with their fears of danger befalling their parents or themselves. As treatment progresses and the child feels more comfortable with the therapist, the parents gradually remove themselves from the session.  This is done by having the parents get further and further away from the treatment room for increasingly longer periods of time. As the child learns to separate from the parent in session, this skill is expanded to other areas of their lives.

Parents of children with separation anxiety often find it difficult to watch their child's discomfort in the face of separation and end up alleviating their child's immediate anxiety by submitting to their child's clinginess. Treatment focuses on helping parents manage their own discomfort and develop tools to help their child facilitate separation.

In adolescents and adults, cognitive therapy is utilized to challenge those thoughts of danger that perpetuate the Separation Anxiety. Behavioral separation tasks and coping skills training are used to help the patient conquer their separation anxiety.