With a little help from FUN FRIENDS young children can overcome anxiety

This paper highlights resilience as a key concept when working with young children to improve their emotional wellbeing and reduce anxieties. Supporting children aged 4-7 years with anxiety is a significant area of advancement in terms of therapeutic approaches over the last decade. This paper outlines one such approach that was implemented within a Tier 2 Community Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service (CAMHS) within the northern region of England to determine whether findings from Australian studies could be replicated in the UK. A pilot study was undertaken with a group of young children aged 4-7 years old with symptoms of anxiety. All of the children had been referred to the service because of anxiety related issues, such as social phobia, generalised anxiety disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder. They received a group intervention, FUN FRIENDS, over a period of 12 weeks. By enabling the children to become more self-sufficient this allowed greater emotional and social skills development. All the children demonstrated improved anxiety scores post intervention, as measured by the Spence Child Anxiety Scale.