School education (learning new things, testing acquired skills and abilities) is always accompanied by an increase in the level of anxiety in children. Some optimal level of anxiety activates the learning process and makes it more effective. In this case, anxiety acts as a factor in mobilizing attention, memory, and intellectual abilities. But when the level of anxiety exceeds the optimal limit, the child can be seized by panic. Trying to avoid failure, he or she either loses interest in the activity, or tries to do everything to achieve success in a particular situation, but is so exhausted that “fails” in other situations. All this increases the fear of failure, increases anxiety, becoming a constant hindrance.
The child's anxiety is caused by an inner conflict, a clash of two conflicting aspirations in his soul, when something important for him simultaneously attracts and repels.
This internal encounter may be based on conflicting demands on the child from different sources; demands beyond the capacity of the child; demands that hurt the child, placing him in a humiliated, dependent position. In the first case, he or she runs between two poles, trying to combine incompatible rules and ideals in his or her behavior. In the second case, he suffers from a burning feeling of impossibility to achieve those high “living standards” (in education or other matters), which he considers to be obligatory for himself. In the third case, love and affection for a loved one come into conflict with the feeling of cold and rejection coming from this person.
Such an internal conflict very often correlates with complications in external relations between parents, between family and school, between child and peers. However, the relationship here is not unambiguous. Not every child becomes anxious. Then why do similar outwardly similar conflicts in some children penetrate into the depths of the soul, while other guys and girls remain indifferent to them? The reasons are many, but the main among them — what kind of relationship for the child are significant. If a pupil does not value the teacher's opinion, he or she will certainly try to avoid a conflict, but the teacher's reproaches will not cause him or her to suffer from mental anguish. It is a different matter if he gets a sharp assessment of his actions or abilities from the one on whose words he is used to relying and whose opinion he cherishes. Anxiety penetrates the child's soul only when the conflict permeates his or her entire life, preventing him or her from fulfilling his or her most important needs.
These most important needs inherent in any child, any person include: the need for physical existence (food, water, freedom from physical threat, etc.), the need for intimacy, attachment to a person or group of people, the need for independence, independence, recognition of the right to one's own self, the need for self-realization, the discovery of their abilities, their potential, the need for purpose, the meaning of their lives.
One of the most common causes of school anxiety is excessively high and strict requirements of parents, which do not take into account the abilities of the child, his level of development, the orientation of his interests. Most often these requirements are expressed in the formula “you must be an excellent student”. It is not without reason that many anxious children are well or excellently trained, diligent schoolchildren, neat, trying to avoid mistakes at all costs. In other cases, too much parental attention is paid to the children's extracurricular achievements. Adults force a child to engage in music or swimming, dancing or a foreign language. Of course, these hobbies are not harmful in themselves, but the child should be able to choose them freely and independently. Doing business that he or she is not attracted to, just because this business is highly valued by his or her parents, the child constantly experiences a painful contradiction between the demands of his or her loved ones and his or her propensities.
At the heart of such parental requirements is the idea that the child must necessarily achieve some externally visible success, something to achieve — in learning, in sports, in life in general. And it should be loved and appreciated in accordance with these achievements.
This approach, which evaluates a child by his or her success (performance), is undoubtedly generated by the school. For many teachers, the only characteristic of a student is his or her performance, and the only approach to the child is to create a powerful press of requirements.