Anxiety profiles in children with and without developmental coordination disorder.
Kids with motor coordination disorder often carry heavy anxiety—especially social, panic, and OCD-like worries—so screen while you assess.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Matson et al. (2011) asked parents to rate anxiety in two groups of kids. One group had developmental coordination disorder. The other group had typical motor skills.
The team used a child anxiety checklist with six sub-scales. They wanted to see which kinds of worry showed up most in kids who struggle with movement.
What they found
Parents of kids with DCD reported much higher overall anxiety. The biggest jumps were in social anxiety, panic, and OCD-like thoughts.
Yet scores varied a lot from child to child. Some kids with DCD showed little worry, while others landed in the clinical range.
How this fits with other research
Missiuna et al. (2014) extends these results. They added an ADHD group and found the highest anxiety when DCD and ADHD occur together.
Rivilis et al. (2011) looks at the same DCD population but focuses on low fitness instead of worry. Their review reminds us that motor trouble and inactivity travel together, which could feed the social fears L et al. flagged.
Spackman et al. (2025) zooms out. Across autism, ADHD, and OCD they show that anxiety links to compulsions no matter the label. This supports L et al.’s call to watch for OCD-like symptoms in DCD.
Why it matters
If you assess a child for coordination problems, add a quick parent anxiety checklist. Target social, panic, and obsessive items. When scores are high, loop in mental-health services early. Simple step, big payoff.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Previous work has highlighted that children diagnosed with DCD may be at risk of greater problems related to emotional wellbeing. However, to date much work has relied on population based samples, and anxiety has not been examined within a group of children given a clinical diagnosis of DCD. Additionally, the profile of individual differences has generally not been considered within this group. Therefore, a group of parents (n=27) completed the parent version of the Spence Children's Anxiety Scale (SCAS-P; Spence, 1998) in relation to their children with a diagnosis of DCD. Their responses on this measure were compared to those of parents with typically developing (TD) children (n=35; both groups 6-15 years of age). Children diagnosed with DCD were reported to experience significantly greater levels of anxiety overall, as well as having significantly greater difficulty than the TD group in the domains of panic/agoraphobic anxiety, social phobia, and obsessive compulsive anxiety. In addition, the individual profiles of types of anxiety reportedly experienced varied widely across the DCD group. These findings suggest that anxiety is a major problem for a proportion of children diagnosed with DCD, and raises questions regarding intervention, long term outcomes, and the nature of the disorder itself.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2011 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2011.02.006