I have two children with anxiety, one who has been described as the "total teflon personality - everything slides off"! My oldest has been officially diagnosed with anxiety disorder, my youngest has no diagnosis but clearly is a highly anxious child. FWIW, both my ds who has the diagnosis and my teflon-child developed fairly severe anxiety in 2nd grade, and with *both* children it was due to having an undiagnosed challenge that no one was aware of give them a challenge that was too large for them to continue compensating for at school as the work and expectations at school ramped up - yet the challenges didn't manifest in a way that we (parents and teachers) easily recognized what was up, and neither did my kids. My ds has a fine motor disability and expressive language disability, and my dd has vision challenges - it wasn't until their anxiety ramped up sky-high and we went through neurospych evals that we realized what was really going on. Both kids' anxiety levels went *way* down after we understood what was at the root of their anxiety - ds is still clearly a child who reacts to stress with anxiety, but once we understood his disability, implemented acccommodations at school and made a teacher switch, his anxiety went way way down and even in tough times since then has never ramped up again. After a few months of vision therapy the teflon child's ability to read suddenly took off, and as far as I can tell she hasn't had an ounce of anxiety invade her teflon world since then.
One thing about ds - he's our exceptionally gifted child - he does feel things in an extremely sensitive way, much deeper than I think most kids. He also appeared to be a perfectionist, which many gifted kids are, and which all of us thought was part of the issue (parents and teachers) - turns out we were mistaking clues about his fine motor struggles as perfectionism.
My youngest dd, who also has extreme anxiety, has a high need to control everything, which is (I think) her way of dealing with stress. We suspect she's at least highly gifted based on her achievement and ideas, but she hasn't been tested at this point. She's in 2nd grade this year, soaring in math/science, but having some challenges with other school work for the first time and that's really ramped up her tantrums and need to control things.
polarbear
