When To Worry About Your Kid's Facial And Body Tics
It's actually really common for kids to make repetitive movements and noises—and how you handle them matters.
Watching your kid make repetitive movements or sounds can be concerning for a parent. Here's what you need to know about tics in kids—what they are, why they happen, if they need to be treated, and if so, how that can be done.
01What are tics?
Tics are repetitive and involuntary movements and sounds, explains Michelle Pearce, a child and adolescent psychiatrist at the Possibilities Clinic in Toronto, who is an expert in the diagnosis and treatment of tic disorders and Tourette Syndrome.
If your child has been persistently involuntarily shrugging his shoulders or clearing his throat, for example, he could have a tic, which is a fairly common childhood experience—research shows at any given time about 22 percent of preschoolers in a population will have tics, and about 7.8 percent of elementary school children will have tics.
A kid will tic because they have an urge to do a movement or make a sound that creates a feeling of relief or a decrease in tension, explains paediatric neurologist Asif Doja, who is chief of the division of neurology at the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario (CHEO) in Ottawa, as well as Director of CHEO’s movement disorders clinic. “Older kids can verbalize that inner tension and that sense of relief, but younger kids don’t,” he notes, explaining that typically, it’s kids age 10 and up who can talk about what they’re feeling when they tic.
Tics typically start at around age five or six, and peak in the preteen years, when they can get worse, and they often decrease after that age, he says. “By age 18, the majority of kids will either have a significant improvement or a complete resolution in their tics.”
