7 Signs of Childhood Anxiety

We’re sharing stories and experiences of people who have been there and know what it’s like to experience the highs and lows of mental illness.

Just last year, mega-star and Twitter troll extraordinaire, Ryan Reynolds opened up about his lifelong battle with anxiety.

“I have anxiety. I’ve always had anxiety,” Reynolds told New York Times Journalist, Cara Buckley.

The Deadpool actor revealed that it was his childhood and the methods of his former police officer father that shaped the ways anxiety controlled much of his life.

“When you stress out kids, there’s a weird paradox that happens because they’re suddenly taking on things that aren’t theirs to take on,” Reynolds explains, saying he used to obsess over keeping the house clean as not to cause conflict with his father.

I was on the phone with my own dad the other day when we got to talking about some of the anxieties he’s dealt with his entire life.

And it got me thinking. Now that I’m an adult, and I know what anxiety is and how it manifests in my life, I’m able to see how it was fostered in me as a child, just as Reynolds touched on in his NYT profile.

As an adult, I constantly find myself battling this irrational, but very real fear that my husband is going to die. Not like we’re going to grow old and die one day — I get that that happens. I’m talking like, right now. At 26 years old, he’s going to leave the house and not come back. This fear was put on blast a month ago when a close friend of ours tragically lost her husband after he went out for an evening jog and was hit by a drunk driver.

In talking about it with my dad, I explained it as a “new anxiety” — something I’ve just only experienced in the last two years since getting married.

But the more we talked, the more I realized, I’ve been harboring this separation anxiety my entire life.

I remember as a kid, I refused to let my parents leave the house or hang up the phone before I said “I love you.” I would have straight screaming matches with my dad as a teenager and ten minutes later when he would leave the house to go do something, I would run to him and make sure I hugged him and told him I loved him.

I have always had this very heavy fear that when someone walks out that door, they aren’t going to come back. And it’s visible to me now more than ever, that my anxieties as an adult aren’t “new” or unfamiliar. It’s just that they’re now diagnosed and recognized.


Bri Lamm
Bri Lamm
Bri Lamm is the Editor of foreverymom.com. An outgoing introvert with a heart that beats for adventure, she lives to serve the Lord, experience the world, and eat macaroni and cheese all while capturing life’s greatest moments on one of her favorite cameras. Follow her on Facebook.

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