If there's any question whether anxiety is genetic, my family is a perfect answer. My grandfather had his first panic attack when he was in his forties and spent the next fifty years of his life hunched and terrified. My father's anxiety began in his twenties, and his brother and sister have both struggled with their own anxiety to varying degrees. While my youngest cousin and I are the the most seriously affected by anxiety disorders, the four other grandchildren have struggled with mental health issues as well.

My youngest cousin is ten years younger than I am, and so by the time she was born I had already had my first panic attack. I was in regular therapy by fourteen and by fifteen I was handing out tissues and suggesting therapists and reading materials to friends who seemed to be struggling with similar symptoms. I was a regular anxiety welcome-wagon. But when my cousin started, at age 7 or 8, to talk about the scary thoughts she was having, I was, frankly, at a loss as how to help.

There must be good scholarship out there about kids with anxiety disorders. But by the time I took the initiative to figure out what was going on and get into therapy, I was already a teenager. I'm not sure whether being in therapy sooner would have helped my anxiety -- my anxiety isn't particularly helped by talk-therapy -- but it would have helped me understand that I wasn't going crazy. Understanding anxiety as a disorder was incredibly liberating for me, because suddenly I wasn't insane or oversensitive or hysterical.

For a number of reasons, many of them no fault of their own, my parents didn't pay much attention to my anxiety when I was a kid. I'm not sure how they ignored it, but they more or less did. It's likely that I didn't tell them half of the things that were worrying me, but I do remember calling my mother at work each day after school for reassurance about something or another. "No, getting a little bit of soap in your mouth won't hurt you." "I am sure that you didn't swallow that tiny piece of your braces that fell off." "Your headache is not a brain tumor. Go to sleep."

I work with kids now, and I understand that my parents were probably more annoyed than worried. Parents work hard to make sure that their kids are safe from real live dangers; good parents learn not to sweat the small stuff. From my own experience, a kid who is constantly questioning his or her own safety is frankly kind of annoying. I'm the grown up, I've made sure that the world is more or less safe for you, so why don't you just believe me when I say that it's safe. "Why are you not really going to die? Because I said so!"

But your kid's anxiety is bigger than you. Their anxieties are not about you, they're not about how you react to them, they're not about something you're doing wrong or right as a parent. Even if you can successfully comfort your panicked kid, you will have to keep comforting for the rest of your life. Because if we're talking real, clinical anxiety, then your kid's anxiety is about their brain chemistry.

And so I told my aunt and uncle to find a therapist for my cousin. I told them about all the treatments I'd done, about the changes I made in diet and exercise and the meditation techniques I use and the medication I take.

For you, I will say: most importantly, find a therapist who takes your child's anxieties seriously. A therapist who understands how torturous anxiety can be, who gives your child room to talk about the things they fear and understands that anxiety treatments are as varied as the people who have the disorder.

Good luck.