When Your Kid Feels Sick Every School Morning
You used to be so anxious watching your kid feel sick before school. The mornings have their own rhythm now, the stomachaches, the worry showing up in her body before she even has the words for it. You feel it land in your own chest. Your breath gets shallow. The whole day already feels off-kilter, and it has barely begun. By the time you are buckling her into the car, both of you are running on fumes.
She performs poorly on tests you know she has studied for. You have sat with her. You have quizzed her. You know she knows the material. But something happens between home and that classroom, and the answers slip somewhere just out of reach. The anxiety eats them alive. She comes home flat. You can see it in her shoulders before she even tells you how the day went.
It is not just the tests. It is the other kids too. The hallways, the lunch table, the group projects. You watch her shrink back. You see how badly she wants to do well, how badly she wants to belong, and how much that wanting is costing her.
If your kid is older, in high school or away at college, the picture looks different but the worry is the same. The text messages from her dorm at 1 a.m. The grades that do not match the smart kid you know she is. The quiet during phone calls that used to be lively. You are watching her struggle from further away, and it does not hurt any less.
You lie awake wondering if you are missing something. You love this kid so much it knocks the wind out of you. And no matter how hard you try, you cannot fix this for her.
Underneath the worry, something else is still alive in her. The wanting. The fact that she is still trying. The way she lights up when she gets something right, even when the lighting up is fast and quiet because she does not quite trust it yet.
She is still in there. The bright kid, the funny kid, the kid who cared enough to be nervous in the first place. Anxiety did not erase her. It just got loud.
Little Dove Psychology is a small group practice. The work described on this page is provided by our clinical team. Meet our team →
The work is grounded in evidence-based approaches that actually move the needle on anxiety: cognitive behavioral therapy, exposure-based methods, parent coaching, and protocols designed for tough situations like school refusal. None of it is rigid. The science gets shaped to fit the young person in front of our clinicians and the family she belongs to. In practice, that usually looks like:
This is not about turning her into a different person. It is about helping the bright, sensitive, funny human you already see come through more often, with less weight on her shoulders.
Separation anxiety tends to show up at the edges of the day. The school drop-off that turns into a twenty-minute negotiation at the classroom door. The child who follows you from room to room, or cannot fall asleep unless you are lying next to her. Another call from the school nurse about a stomachache. The birthday party she begged to go to and then will not walk into without you. Underneath it is usually one worry on repeat: that something bad will happen to you, or to her, while you are apart. It is most common in younger kids, and it can flare again at big transitions like a new school, a move, or a divorce. Therapy for separation anxiety in kids works on both sides of the goodbye. Your child learns what the worry is doing and practices short, planned separations that stretch a little longer each week. You get coached on the hardest part for a loving parent: pulling back from the extra reassurance and the rescues that calm things down tonight but keep the fear going. Online sessions suit this work, because so many of the separations that matter happen at home, at bedtime and at the front door, and that is where we can practice them.
Sometimes the person who needs the anxiety work is you. Parenting an anxious kid is anxiety-producing in its own right, and plenty of Austin parents carry their own morning knot: the work stress, the mental load, the 2 a.m. worry loops about the kid, the job, the everything. We offer dedicated therapy for parents and caregivers, and in family work we often help parents manage their own anxiety so it stops amplifying their child’s. Dr. Kroll has written about why that works: parent stress and the anxious teen. If your young person is heading to or already in college, our therapy for college students page covers how anxiety work looks at that stage.
If your family has Aetna, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Texas, or Optum (UnitedHealthcare), anxiety therapy for your child, teen, or college student is billed to your plan, and you pay your copay or cost share rather than the self-pay rate. Oscar Health plans are in network too. That covers the work on this page: CBT, exposure-based work, and the parent coaching that goes with it. On the free consultation, read us the plan name on your card and we will verify your benefits and tell you the expected cost before anything is scheduled. Sessions are online across Texas, most families start the same week, and evening and weekend appointments are available. Details are on our Fees & Insurance page.
Short, practical guides parents can use tonight:
Our team works with kids, teens, college students, and adults. Anxiety can show up at any age, and the approach adjusts to fit a six-year-old, a fourteen-year-old, a twenty-year-old, or an adult's actual life.
If anxiety is showing up in her body (stomachaches, headaches, trouble sleeping), interfering with school or college, or shrinking her world by making her avoid things she used to enjoy, those are real signals worth taking seriously.
Often yes, and sometimes there is also something physical going on, so it is worth ruling that out with her pediatrician. School-related stomachaches are one of the most common ways anxiety shows up.
Both, and on purpose. For kids and teens, parent coaching is core. For college students, family involvement is on her terms. Some young adults want their parents in the loop, others want the work to be theirs alone. Both are fine.
That is great. If she is 18 or older, we can work together directly. She is the client. Family can be involved in whatever way she chooses, including not at all.
Yes, with the right setup. Online sessions work well for many kids, teens, and college students. We offer online therapy across PSYPACT states (including Texas), which works especially well for college students away at school.
Yes. Anxiety therapy is billed in network to Aetna, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Texas, Optum (UnitedHealthcare), and Oscar Health, so members pay their plan’s copay or cost share. We verify your benefits before the first session. For other plans, we provide a superbill you can submit for possible out-of-network reimbursement, and HSA and FSA funds apply.
Look for a therapist trained in cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and exposure-based work. Those are the gold-standard treatments for anxiety in kids, teens, and adults. For a child or teen, you also want someone with experience working with parents, because anxiety treatment for young people is most effective when family and school can support the work between sessions. Credentialed psychologists (PhD or PsyD) and licensed therapists with specific anxiety training are good places to start.
The 3-3-3 rule is a grounding technique that can help in the middle of an anxiety spike. You name 3 things you can see, 3 things you can hear, and then move 3 parts of your body. It works by pulling attention back to the present moment when anxiety has pulled it into worried thoughts about the future. It is not a cure for anxiety, but it is a useful in-the-moment tool, especially helpful for kids and teens, who can use it quietly at school, in the car, or before bed.
Yes. Test anxiety in elementary and middle school kids responds well to cognitive behavioral therapy, and a short course is often enough when the anxiety is specific to testing. If the stomachaches, sleep trouble, or avoidance show up in ordinary weeks too, the test is the occasion rather than the cause, and that is worth treating. Dr. Kroll's guide to STAAR test anxiety covers what the score actually decides under Texas law, a four-week plan, and a two-minute routine for test morning.
Some signs that warrant a consult with an anxiety therapist in Austin: your child has physical symptoms (stomachaches, headaches, trouble sleeping) that doctors cannot fully explain, school refusal or avoidance of normal activities, racing thoughts at bedtime, perfectionism that is making her miserable, social withdrawal, or panic-like episodes. Anxiety in kids and teens often masquerades as defiance, irritability, or laziness, patterns that do not make sense until you understand the anxiety driving them. A free 15-minute consultation is the simplest way to figure out whether what you are seeing warrants professional support.
For younger kids (5-10), anxiety therapy in Austin involves a lot of parent coaching, behavioral practice, and play-based exposure work. For tweens and teens (11-17), the work shifts to direct skill-building: cognitive behavioral therapy, exposure work, and learning to manage anxiety in real-life scenarios like school, friendships, and performance. For college students, the work often focuses on managing independence with chronic anxiety, panic management, and balancing academic and social demands without burning out. The core methods stay the same; the delivery flexes to fit developmental stage.
It is built on gradual, collaborative exposure work. We map the situations your teen avoids (the cafeteria, raising a hand in class, ordering food, parties), build a ladder from least to most scary, and climb it one rung at a time while teaching skills for the physical wave of anxiety. Most socially anxious teens in Austin engage well with online sessions, because starting therapy from their own room removes the hardest first step. Parents get coaching on how to support the practice without accidentally taking over.
Mostly practice. We start with separations your child can already manage, like a parent stepping into the next room or a short visit with a grandparent, and build up from there on a plan she helps make. With younger kids, much of the change comes through parents, so a good share of the work is coaching you: what to say at drop-off, how to keep goodbyes short, and how to answer the worry without feeding it. We check progress at the start and every four weeks, so you can see whether it is working.
Research consistently shows online anxiety therapy is as effective as in-person therapy for most anxiety presentations in kids and teens. In fact, some kids do better virtually because the home setting feels safer, and parents can join sessions easily without coordinating logistics. The exception is severe school refusal where in-person practice is part of treatment, but even there, online sessions can do much of the parent coaching and skills work between in-person practice sessions.
Some anxiety is developmental and resolves naturally. But research is clear: untreated anxiety in childhood is the strongest predictor of anxiety, depression, and substance use problems in adulthood. The good news is that anxiety responds extremely well to treatment: anxiety therapy in Austin using evidence-based methods like CBT and exposure work has some of the best outcomes of any kind of therapy. If your child has had anxiety symptoms for 3+ months and they are affecting daily life, treatment is more likely to help than waiting.
This is common with anxious kids: the anxiety itself fights against treatment because change feels scary. We work with you on several strategies: framing therapy as skills-building rather than fixing what is wrong, starting with parent-only sessions so the child sees you putting in the work first, doing a no-pressure first session focused entirely on getting to know your child, and using motivational interviewing techniques to help your kid arrive at her own reasons for trying it. Many initially-reluctant kids become engaged within 2-3 sessions.
Sessions are 60 minutes. For most kids and teens with anxiety, expect 12-20 sessions over 4-6 months for meaningful change. Severe anxiety, panic disorder, OCD, or anxiety stacked with other concerns (ADHD, depression, family conflict) often takes longer: 6-12 months is typical. If OCD is the main concern, our OCD therapy page explains how exposure and response prevention works over video, and parents who want their own plan can start with parent coaching. We use outcome measures to track progress, so you will see in real numbers when things are working. Anxiety therapy in Austin is not open-ended; we are working toward your child managing anxiety without needing weekly therapy.
Physical signs: stomachaches, headaches, sleep problems, eating changes. Behavioral signs: avoidance of school or social situations, perfectionism, irritability, withdrawal. Cognitive signs: catastrophizing, what-if loops, intrusive worries. Social signs: friend conflict, withdrawal from activities she used to enjoy. If you are noticing two or three of these clustering and lasting more than 2-3 weeks, a consultation with an anxiety therapist in Austin can help you figure out whether what you are seeing warrants treatment or is something a few skills can address at home.
Every family’s situation is different, and these FAQs cannot answer everything. The simplest next step is a free 15-minute consultation with our team. We can talk through what you are seeing in your child, what an anxiety therapist in Austin would actually do, and whether Little Dove Psychology is the right fit for your family. No commitment, no sales pitch, just a real conversation to help you figure out the next step.
Take the first step with a free 15-minute consultation. Call (512) 240-2633 or contact us online.
“Dr. Kroll is kind, compassionate and professional. She takes the time to truly listen and never makes you feel rushed or judged. Her calm, approachable style and expertise make a huge difference, and I would confidently recommend her to anyone.”
“I can’t recommend Dr. Kristin Kroll at Little Dove Psychology highly enough. She is extremely knowledgeable and brings years of experience to every session, and you can tell she genuinely cares and is invested in helping you.”
“Would very highly recommend Little Dove Psychology for mental health therapy.”
