Children\u27s Anxiety Management Program: Its Effects on School Anxiety, Defensiveness & Self-Disparagement

Anxiety and stress are factors which affect children\u27s day to day functioning. It affects their psychological, physiological, and social functioning. This in turn causes children to do poorly in academics, have poor interpersonal relationships, acquire many fears and phobias, and develop many somatic complaints (e.g., muscle tension, speech disturbances, hypertension, etc.). Children who experience stress and who do not learn to cope with it effectively are likely to have problems as adults. Therefore, the Children\u27s Anxiety Management Program (C.A.M.P.) was initiated to a group of 5th and 6th grade school children in Bowling Green, Kentucky. The purpose of the program was to (1) assess the effects C.A.M.P. had on children in regard to anxiety, defensiveness, and self-disparagement, (2) teach children strategies to cope with stress and anxiety, (3) train the teachers in the skills of C.A.M.P., (4) to sensitize the teachers to children\u27s needs when stress and anxiety are involved, and (5) to validate C.A.M.P. The Children\u27s Anxiety Management Program is built on an evaluation model. Process and outcome evaluation procedures were used during this study and included (1) evaluation of student and teacher logbooks, (2) direct observation of the implementation of the program, (3) discussion with the teachers, students, and parents, and (4) analysis of anxiety test results. This type of evaluation insures that the program\u27s goals are met as completed and monitors the overall effects of the program. It was hypothesized that after completion of the program, anxiety would decrease in the children undergoing the program. This hypothesis was examined via the Children\u27s School Questionnaire and process evaluation procedures (e.g., logbook monitoring, observation, etc.). The children underwent a 15 week program for approximately one hour per day, while a control group in a local elementary school did not. The results show that there was a significant difference between treatment conditions. The group undergoing treatment showed a significant lowering of school anxiety; whereas, the control group did not change significantly. Any result was considered significant if it achieved an alpha level greater than .01, which supports the hypothesis. While defensiveness and self-disparagement did not lower significantly, it can be inferred that since C.A.M.P. was not designed to deal with these factors, these results were anticipated