As a person familiar with anxiety and all its ramifications I read Robin Marantz Henig‘s article “Understanding the Anxious Mind” in the New York Times with great interest.

Henig primarily focuses on Jerome Kagan‘s longitudinal study beginning in 1989, which looked at whether babies were easily upset or not when exposed to new things. They checked physiological factors like heart rate, blood pressure, irritability – behaviours linked to the functioning of the amygdala, “… the amygdala is hyperactive, prickly as a haywire motiona-detector light that turns on when nothing’s moving but the rain.” The study, looking at the two extremes of reactivity, found that most highly reactive babies evolved into young adults with anxiety whereas most very low reactive babies did not.

The huge spectrum in the middle was not so clear-cut. One of their concluding statements was, “The predictive power of an anxiety-prone temperament, such as it is, essentially works in just one direction: not by predicting what these children will become but by predicting what they will not. In the longitudinal studies of anxiety, all you can say with confidence is that the high-reactive infants will not grow up to be exuberant, outgoing, bubbly or bold.” Of course, the whole nature/nurture discussion emerged, which I personally find redundant.

It goes without saying that there is an interaction. However, that shouldn’t detract from what we can glean from studies such as these. With the incidence of anxiety illnesses, including panic, social anxiety, phobias, obsessive compulsive , post traumatic or generalized anxiety disorders, being the most common mental illness and accounting for 40 million sufferers in the United States, it is some comfort to know that at least, in part, it is inborn.

Genetic or not is less important a predicament than what we should do about it. Henig raises the question as to what parenting style suits a more anxious child. Now we’re getting somewhere! “Attempts to see what kind of parenting works best with an anxiety-prone temperament leave almost as many questions asked as answered. Which is better for a fearful, high-strung child — a parent who coddles the child and says everything will be all right, or a parent who sets firm, strict limits and has no tolerance for skittishness?” She then goes on to cite two studies that show both parenting styles to be of value, which then leads to the obvious conclusion that a marriage between the two is more likely the answer.

“Amie Ashley Hane a decade later, found something slightly different: that the best fit for high-strung babies were sensitive mothers, who met their fearful children on their own terms and interacted with them in a way that was accepting and supportive without being intrusive.” What we want children to be, regardless of how it happens, is to be able to independently wrestle with their demons and find ways to deal with them. One of Kagan’s subjects, a thirteen year old, who tested as a highly reactive infant, said “Inner struggles pulled at me for years until I was able to just let go and calm myself, … For example, when I first heard about the anthrax in Washington, I began to have an upset stomach. I realized it was simply because of my anxiety that I was feeling sick. As soon as I realized that, the stomachache went away. Because I now understand my predisposition toward anxiety, I can talk myself out of simple fears.”

Wow, I couldn’t have said it better myself!

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Marsha Jacobson is author of "Boom... Boom... Boom...: A Story to Raise Your Child's Emotional Intelligence". She is a regular contributor of mychildfeels.com and you can visit her website at marshajacobson.com.