ABSTRACT
Children often suffer from stress and anxiety at school transition. This chapter explains how stress and anxiety occur in the body and discusses the stressors that children encounter when changing schools. There are two types of anxiety that crop up in studies of school transition. The first is children's transition anxiety, which can be defined as their worries about changing schools. The second is children's tendency to have symptoms of an anxiety disorder, such as separation anxiety. Transition anxiety is that children are less anxious when the environmental differences between schools are small. Children with existing anxiety disorders may be more vulnerable to the differences in school environment. In the study of American Psychological Association (APA) on gender and stress, more women than men reported emotional and physical signs of stress, including having a headache, feeling tearful and experiencing digestive problems. The chapter summarises how anxiety about changing schools and anxiety disorders typically develop in transition-aged children.
