My anxiety started in 1986. This year, I’m 40 years in on my anxiety medication-free. My daughter is on year 7 with anxiety and she too has been medication-free too. I want to be upfront: this isn’t a medical opinion, and it’s not advice for your family. It’s just where my head has been lately.
I’ve been in a few Facebook groups for parents of kids with anxiety, and one thing that keeps coming up is medication. So many parents are giving their kids anxiety medication, sometimes starting young, often for years, and wondering out loud if it’s the right call, or if there’s something else out there.
I’m not a doctor, and I’m not anyone’s parent but my own daughter’s. I know medication is genuinely the right choice for a lot of kids, and for a lot of families it’s what makes daily life possible. That’s real, and I don’t want to down play that.
But I’ll be honest about where I land personally: I’d rather see more energy going toward finding an actual cure, or better long-term solutions, than toward managing anxiety with medication indefinitely. I’m not saying it because I’m forty years in medication free, but I’m surprised how much medication talk is going on. I get anxiety taking over the counter medications! Again, this is just me, but it seems like a lot of medications have some kind of side effect or dependency.
For my daughter, we’ve leaned on things outside of medication; a 504 plan at school, routines that keep her engaged and connected, and tools like erly that help her day to day. It hasn’t been a straight line. There are still hard days. But seven years in, it’s working for her. There are other things too, like daily praying at home, weekly prayer at church, understanding how to talk at home, play time with friends, her social activities etc., that have helped.
I don’t think every family will land in the same place we did, and that’s okay. Every kid is different, every diagnosis is different, and what a psychiatrist recommends for your child should carry more weight than a blog post from a stranger on the internet. My hope in sharing this is just that it adds one more data point, and maybe one more question, to a conversation a lot of parents are already having: is medication the only path, or one of several worth exploring with your child’s doctor?
That’s the conversation I’d like to see more of.
If you’re a parent with a child who is having a hard time, reach out to me. Again, I’m not a doctor, but I’m just a parent who genuinely cares about others and wants every human being on earth to live a happy and healthy life.
