Childhood Separation Anxiety Associated with Adult Anxiety Disorders

Introduction
Imagine a school bus driver and his dilemma when a student refuses to get off at her stop. The first grader is frozen to her seat in tears because she cannot see her mother from the bus window as usual. The mother is standing in the yard waiting for her child as always, but sees that the bus drives away. The frustrated driver returns the child back to the school. An aggravated principal meets with the parent over the incident shaming the child as she throws her hands up in the air saying, “I have kindergarteners who walk home alone!” The distraught parent intervenes with the principal’s inappropriate statements, but leaves having to acknowledge the reality of a new manifestation of an ongoing problem. She is diagnosed with Separation Anxiety Disorder at the age of seven.
Separation anxiety is said to have a childhood onset earlier than the median age of any specific phobia. Are children with separation anxiety bound to adult anxiety disorders? Studies are making the connection between childhood separation anxiety and increased risk of subsequent disorders in adulthood. There is an estimated 33% to 40% chance that a child diagnosed with Separation Anxiety Disorder (SAD) will develop another psychiatric disorder between ages nineteen and thirty. Continued studies will help clinicians gain understanding and develop preventative treatment for children with SAD into adulthood (Lewinsohn, Holm-Denoma, & Joiner, 2008).
A Review of the Literature
Childhood Separation Anxiety Disorder
Separation Anxiety Disorder (SAD) is prevalent in 4.1% of children aged 7 – 11 and 3.9% in children 12 – 14 years old in the United States ("Separation Anxiety Disorder Related," n.d.). SAD onset is most common during the ages of seven to t...

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