THOMAS was in year four and hated going to school.

He'd always had trouble separating from his mother.

Then, at the start of school last year, his freshly settled class was disbanded and split up.

Thomas's new, stricter teacher ruled that no one was to go to the toilet during class, that they had to wait for the breaks.

It was too much for Thomas, whose mother one day got a call from the school. Thomas couldn't stop crying and shaking.

His little heart was beating wildly, his mother Jenny recalls.

The family lives in NSW, near regional cities where pediatricians said Thomas was hyperactive and recommended the drug Ritalin.

Mental health workers had told Jenny and her husband that they were feeding Thomas's anxieties with their reassurances.

No one offered them strategies to change.

About one in 10 children suffer anxieties as Thomas did, to debilitating levels.

Included are kids who have separation anxieties, who need constant reassurance, are extremely shy, always good, struggle with public performance, and hate going to school, going to the toilet or sleeping without lights on.

Psychologists say anxieties such as these, if left untreated, can cause developmental problems in kids.

A research team at the Centre for Emotional Health at Macquarie University in Sydney has been investigating ways to help rural and remote families whose children are overly anxious.

Its Child Anxiety Rural Outreach Program (CAROP) provides counselling to primary school children aged eight or more in various combinations - over the phone to a parent, or with parent and child in separate phone calls.

This phase of the research, funded for three years by the National Health and Medical Research Council, is examining which works best.

Jenny joined the program in September last year.

Each week she'd read a chapter of the CAROP workbook and each week she and Thomas would do activities together.

For 12 weeks, each Friday afternoon, she'd have an hour on the phone with a CAROP psychologist.

"We'd been battling on our own for seven months," she says.

"Thomas was suffering a lot of anxieties about school, about separating from us. We want him to be able to sleep at friends' places and to go on school camp to enjoy his life, but he needs to be comfortable about staying away."

The family set goals. The first was getting Thomas to sleep without the light on.

With the psychologist Jenny worked out a series of steps, starting with putting a cover over the bed light to putting it outside the door, to having a night light on elsewhere, all the while checking with the CAROP psychologist.

She has nothing but praise for the program.

"Liaising by phone every week was good because if you didn't understand anything you could ask.

"It takes a good hour on the phone and another hour to do the reading and then activities on top of that. It takes work. It wasn't hard.

"If people want quick answers, they're not going to get them. I thought it was more helpful for me than Thomas, because it gave me the tools to work with him."

Another woman I spoke with, a Queenslander whose high-achieving perfectionist daughter was crippled with anxiety about performing her music publicly, was similarly delighted with their involvement in CAROP.

In 12 weeks her daughter moved through playing in front of family and friends to more public performances and recently her daughter auditioned successfully for a part in a stage play.

Clinical psychologist Heidi Lyneham, who heads the CAROP research, says 60 to 80 per cent of kids who took part in CAROP in its initial phase had no anxiety after completing it.

True, the program thoroughly scrutinises applicants.

But it's programs like these that rural dwellers must have, if professional services aren't available locally.

Dr Lyneham is seeking 250 families from around Australia who have an anxious primary school child to volunteer for the current phase of research.