Growing Brave: Helping Children Face Fear in a Difficult World

British children are growing up in conditions that make fear more likely, not less. In 2023/24, more than 500 children a day in England were referred to NHS mental health services with anxiety as the primary cause: 204,526 referrals in total. That is more than double the rate recorded in 2019/20, the year before the pandemic began.

The Good Childhood Report 2025, published by The Children’s Society, found that getting good grades at school was the top worry for children and young people, with 43% saying they were very or quite worried about this. Happiness with friendships is declining. The UK has the widest gap in life satisfaction between the most and least advantaged 15-year-olds in Europe. Children from low-income families are four times more likely to experience mental health problems than children from higher-income families.

Research from Imperial College London, published in 2026, found that children who use social media apps for longer periods and later into the evening are at higher risk of mental health difficulties over time. The key mechanism is sleep disruption. When social media use extends into the evening, it reduces sleep quality and duration. Over the medium to long term, poor sleep has serious consequences for children’s mental health, wellbeing and school performance.

These are real, documented pressures. They are not the products of a generation that simply needs to toughen up. Understanding them is the starting point for helping children respond with courage rather than collapse.

Bravery in children is not a fixed trait that some children have and others do not. This is one of the clearest findings to emerge from research into child development and resilience over the past three decades.

Resilience is shaped by experience and relationship. Attachment theory, developed by psychologist John Bowlby and expanded by Mary Ainsworth and others, establishes that a child’s relationship with their primary caregiver is the foundation from which they explore the world, take risks and recover from setbacks. A child who feels securely attached trusts that their caregiver will be there when things go wrong. That trust makes them more willing to try things they might fail at, because failure does not feel terminal.

A 2019 meta-analysis found that secure attachment is associated with the presence of resilience at a correlation rate between r=.20 and r=.57, a strong and consistent finding across multiple peer-reviewed studies.

A 2025 systematic review and meta-analysis of school-based resilience interventions, drawing on seven academic databases including PubMed and Embase, confirmed that at the individual level, resilience is linked to confidence, self-esteem and self-regulation. At the interpersonal level, resilience involves the presence of supportive caregivers.

The practical implication is significant. What parents do consistently at home matters more to a child’s long-term resilience than most external programmes or interventions, including school-based ones.

The following five approaches are grounded in evidence from child development research and clinical guidance. None requires specialist training. All require consistency.

Research and clinical guidance point to two parental responses that, despite feeling helpful, tend to make anxiety worse in children over time.

The evidence in this guide supports a parenting approach grounded in warmth, honesty and graduated challenge. It is worth acknowledging that this is not the only view. Some argue that modern parenting has become too anxiety-focused: that excessive attention to children’s emotional states can itself model anxiety and that resilience has historically been built through far less supervised experiences of risk and difficulty.

This is a legitimate concern and not without evidence. Research by Jonathan Haidt and others has raised questions about whether increased parental protectiveness has contributed to rising anxiety rates rather than reduced them. The case for some degree of unsupervised play, physical risk-taking and independence is supported by developmental research. The challenge for parents is not choosing between warmth and independence but finding the right balance between being a secure base and allowing a child to move away from it. The evidence supports both elements as necessary.

The guidance in this article is for supporting children through ordinary difficulty, not for managing clinical anxiety disorders. If a child’s fear or worry is persistent, significantly affecting their daily life, causing them to avoid eating, sleeping, school or friendships for more than a few weeks, or if they are expressing thoughts of self-harm, speak to a GP. The GP can make a referral to CAMHS.

Waiting times vary significantly across England. The Children’s Commissioner’s 2025 annual briefing found that in 2022/23, 39% of referrals to CAMHS were closed before the child received any treatment. If you are waiting, Young Minds, Place2Be and The Children’s Society can provide guidance, resources and signposting to other support while you wait.