Anxiety Disorders are the most common mental health problem across the lifespan, create a huge personal burden for individuals and substantial economic burden for society. They have a particularly early age of onset and often run a chronic course- with half of all people who experience an anxiety disorder at some point in their life first experiencing those difficulties by the age of 11 years. Yet we have recently found that less than 3% of children with an anxiety disorder receive an evidence based intervention. This talk will give an overview of recent research on the development and maintenance of anxiety disorders in children, with a particular focus on the implications for delivering brief, psychological interventions that bring the potential to increase access to effective treatments for children with these common and impairing conditions.