Why Is Anxiety Rising in Children? What the New A&E Figures Tell Us
Somewhere in England this week, a six year old is sitting in an A&E waiting room. Not with a broken arm or a temperature that will not come down, but because the adults who love them have run out of ideas. The lights are bright, the room is loud, and the wait may run past twelve hours. For a small number of children this year, it will run past three days.
New figures published this week by the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, drawn from NHS England data, show that 75,491 children and young people aged 6 to 17 attended A&E in England with a recorded mental health concern in 2025. In 2019 that figure was 55,525. That is a 36% rise in six years, and the College's warning is blunt: more children are reaching crisis point.
The detail that should stop us all is where the rise is steepest. It is not teenagers. Attendances by children aged six to nine rose 62% over the same period, faster than any other age group. And once they arrive, many are waiting a very long time. The number of children spending more than twelve hours in A&E has more than trebled since 2019, and 338 children waited more than three days for appropriate support and a safe place to go.
In brief
- Mental health A&E attendances by children in England rose 36% between 2019 and 2025, according to new RCPCH analysis of NHS England figures.
- The fastest rise was among children aged six to nine, up 62%.
- A&E is the right door in an emergency, but it was never designed as a place for a child to wait days for mental health support.
- The STILL Method view: rising childhood anxiety is not an epidemic of broken children. It is nervous systems being trained into alarm, and prevention happens in the rooms children actually live in.
What a six year old in crisis actually tells us
When a six year old ends up in A&E in emotional crisis, the easy conclusion is that something has gone wrong inside the child. The more accurate conclusion is that something has gone wrong around them, for long enough that their system stopped coping.
A child's nervous system is not faulty when it produces anxiety. It is doing its job: scanning for danger, sounding the alarm, preparing the body to survive. The problem comes when that alarm is triggered so often that the system learns alarm as its default setting. I describe this in detail in our guide to the nervous system, but the short version is this: a nervous system learns through repetition, and a six year old's system is still being written. It is trained by the tone of a home, the pace of a classroom, the moods of the adults around it, and the amount of genuine rest and safety it gets between demands.
That is why the rise among the youngest children matters so much. At six, we should be very cautious about looking at distress and immediately asking what is wrong with the child. A nervous system that young is still learning what the world requires it to respond to. And what many of these children have had is plenty of practice at alarm, thousands of repetitions, until it became the pattern. The RCPCH's own doctors made a similar point in their statement, noting how vulnerable young children's development is without early intervention.
If you are reading this as a parent wondering about your own child, our guide Is My Child Anxious? walks through what anxiety looks like at different ages, because in young children it rarely announces itself as worry. It shows up as tummy aches, sleep battles, clinginess and anger long before it shows up in words.
Why the numbers are rising
There is no single cause, and anyone who offers you one is selling something. But a few things are plainly true.
Children today meet pressure, comparison and frightening information earlier than any generation before them, and they get less unstructured recovery time between demands. The adults around them, at home and at school, are often running on stretched systems of their own, and nervous systems train each other. It is much harder for a dysregulated adult to help a dysregulated child feel safe, however much they love them. That is a statement about physiology, not about anyone's parenting.
Then there is the shape of the support system itself. Early help has thinned, waiting lists for children's mental health services are long, and so patterns that could have been settled at the kitchen table or in a classroom are instead left to grow until the only door still open is the emergency department. The threefold increase in long A&E waits is what it looks like when crisis services become the front door rather than the last resort.
A&E is the right door in an emergency. Prevention is about how many children reach it
Nothing in this post argues against taking a child in crisis to A&E. If a child is at immediate risk, the emergency department is exactly where they should be, and the staff there do remarkable work in impossible conditions. The RCPCH is calling for the Government's forthcoming Mental Health Strategy to focus on prevention and early support, so that fewer children reach that point at all. On that, we agree completely.
But prevention is a word that gets used loosely. Prevention is not a poster in a corridor or a one-off assembly about resilience. Prevention is adults who understand what a child's nervous system is doing and know how to respond to it, early, in the ordinary moments: the school morning that keeps collapsing, the bedtime that takes two hours, the child who is silent at school and explosive at home. Those moments are where alarm is either trained in or trained out. By the time a child reaches an A&E corridor, thousands of those moments have already happened.
This is the ground The STILL Method was built on. Anxiety framed as an overtrained nervous system rather than a disorder is not a softer way of saying the same thing. It changes what you do about it, and it changes who can do something about it. If we only understand anxiety as disorder, we wait for the clinic. If we also understand the learned patterns underneath it, there is work we can begin much earlier, and it can be done by the people the child already lives with, learns with and trusts, provided those adults have been shown how.
What early support looks like in practice
For parents, it starts with understanding the mechanism, because a parent who can read the alarm stops taking the behaviour personally and starts responding to the system underneath it. Our free online workshop for parents and teachers of anxious children covers this, and our children and teens programme supports young people directly.
For schools, it means staff who can spot the pattern in September rather than referring it in March. Our school wellbeing training exists for exactly this.
And for the growing number of people who want to work in this field, whether from teaching, care, health or a career change, accredited anxiety coach training is how the early-support workforce actually gets built. School avoidance is often where rising childhood anxiety first becomes visible, months before any hospital is involved, and our EBSA Practitioner Certification trains people to work in exactly that space. The NHS cannot recruit its way out of these figures alone. Some of this capacity has to come from outside it, working alongside it.
These figures will rightly drive questions about crisis care and waiting times. The question that should sit alongside them is what is happening before crisis, in the years of ordinary days that come first. That is where these numbers are being made, and it is where they can be unmade.
Frequently asked questions
Why is anxiety rising in children?
There is no single cause. Children meet pressure, comparison and frightening information earlier than previous generations, with less recovery time in between, and the adults and services around them are stretched, which means patterns of anxiety are caught later. A nervous system learns through repetition, so the more often a child's alarm is triggered without being settled, the more established the pattern becomes.
Is it normal for a six year old to have anxiety?
Some anxiety is normal at every age. Fear of the dark, separation worries and new-situation nerves are part of ordinary development. What matters is the pattern and the impact: whether the anxiety is growing, whether it is hard to soothe, and whether the child's life is starting to shrink around it. Our guide Is My Child Anxious? covers the signs in detail.
What should I do if my child needs help now?
If your child is at immediate risk, call 999 or go to A&E. For urgent concerns that are not an emergency, contact your GP or call NHS 111 and select the mental health option. Children and young people can also talk to Childline free on 0800 1111, at any time. Coaching and early support sit alongside these services, not in place of them.
Where to go from here
If you are a parent or teacher of an anxious child, start with our Is My Child Anxious? guide, or join the free online workshop.
If you want to work in this field, explore our accredited anxiety coach training, trusted by more than 100 coaches worldwide.
Questions? Email train@thestillmethod.org and we will point you in the right direction.
