Nathan is definitely having a hard time as the end of school approaches. We've had a couple of nightmares over colony collapse (thanks to Honey Nut Cheerios' Save the Bees campaign) and about prescription pill abuse (thanks to Drug-Free America ads).
He's been irritable and clingy, which has been a challenge since Alex is also showing the usual end of term anxiety. The number of conflicts has risen quite abruptly in our house and the amount of earned screen-time has fallen.
I've been trying to give him time to express his concerns and prompting him to come up with solutions. Planting flowers and buying bee-friendly produce to help save the bees and pointing out that we don't keep expired prescription drugs.
I know these are just smoke-screens. The underlying anxiety is just taking on whatever form seems convenient and if we remove one, then it simply morphs into something new.
I've been reluctant to set up appointments with a specialist but I'm starting to wonder if my pride is getting in the way of Nathan's health.
I've also been thinking about where this could have come from. My family are worriers (comes with the control freak territory) but this still seems excessive. I've wondered if Nathan's anxiety comes from how Alex used to hit and push him so regularly when Nathan was very small. (It was multiple times per day, even though we tried to never leave them unsupervised. Alex used to run into another room to knock Nathan down, faster than we could keep up with him.)
I've wondered if those kinds of unprovoked and unpredictable attacks have simply taught Nathan at a deep, fundamental level that the world is not a safe place and that he needs to be constantly on guard. If that's the case, I don't know that anything will ever be able to relieve the anxiety. The best we can learn to do is to cope with it and teach Nathan how to keep it from affecting his life too badly.
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