My daughter started daycare as a very young baby and attended 3 different daycare centers by the age of 5. Now as a teen, she has attachment disorder and panic attacks and social anxiety. Do you think her early childhood could have anything to do with it?

Dear Anonymous,

First of all to just realize that we are all so different, some youngsters will have consistently supporting nurturing infancy and STILL have those conditions you describe, others will undergo lots of early-life traumas and very resilient...

So take care no self-blame for you, and from there if that early understanding can help your daughter, then yes to explore those possibilities. We did not know back then what we are seeing now, but humankind is very adaptable and she can recover with a deeper more fulfilling experience of life as she incorporates all that.

Are those clinical diagnoses or are you just guessing?

If you know that for sure, then yes, it is most likely that some of her needs were not met in the daycare situation and that could be the remote cause of some of what you are seeing now.  But I'm assuming that you have her under some sort of professional care or counseling so that you and she can get her the current support she needs to overcome any possible issues that she finds that she has.

In that case, perhaps some of her daycare will turn out to have been less than ideal, but the problem can well respond to help.

If you are guessing, get your suspicions confirmed and proceed accordingly.

But I suspect you have no blame for what happened.  If you need daycare, you need daycare and most day cares are not staffed by PhD's in psychology with access to a medical doctor on site---and if they were, most parents couldn't afford them.

Hang in there, this is very fixable.

My son entered daycare when he was 14 months old and until he reached the age of kindergarten, he was in a new daycare each year. His needs changed and the daycare and/or staff didn't have what he needed.

Despite being around a lot of children at a very young age, he was a very shy kid. So am I, but my mom pushed me hard toward things that I was not comfortable doing.

So, in each new environment my son and I would enter into, we stepped to the side and surveyed the action. I would say things like, "looks like there are a group of kids playing with puzzles over there", or "can you see the kids playing on the swings? Looks like they're having fun. What do you think?" I would allow him time to look things over and decide for himself his level of involvement. There wasn't any pressure to join in.

In addition, he had great male role models at my job who taught him wonderful ways of greeting people. Walk right up, hand outstretched, "Hi I'm Matt, I'm pleased to meet you" and shake their hand firmly, looking them right in the eye. Practice this over and over again.

Kids today don't get that practice of greeting people and making small talk. So they get very anxious because they don't know what to do. I'm believing that a lot of social anxiety can be helped with regular practice talking to people you don't know. Standing in line at the grocery store? Say, "wow, it's certainly a hot day out there today, isn't it?"

I'm shy as a rule, but I make myself engage with people just to keep in practice so I don't freak out. You might try this with your daughter and also ask her what makes her so anxious about her encounters to give you clues to help her.