Childhood anxiety and parents’ involvement: a review

This paper presents a review of the role that parents play in the ethiology and maintenace of child anxiety and in their treatment and prevention. Some educative patterns, such as rejection and, above all, parents’ excessive over-protection behaviour, have been related to the presence of anxiety in children. In fact, a related issue to take into account would be the presence of any type of anxiety disorder in the parents themselves. As far as the child anxiety treatment and its prevention are concerned, data show that training parents in certain strategies and skills and including them in the intervention programme increase the effectiveness of the treatment outcome. Despite the research conducted in the field, the number of publications is still limited. Thus, further investigation is encouraged.