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Teenagers are known to hurt themselves physically when they need to vent out their frustrations or negative emotions. But children as young as third-graders are doing the same, says a new study.

This is the first time that a study has questioned children as young as seven-year-old if they injured themselves. Researchers have found that one in 12 children of the third, sixth and ninth grades they interviewed had injured themselves at least once without really wanting to kill themselves.

"A lot of people tend to think that school-aged children, they're happy, they don't have a lot to worry about," said Benjamin Hankin, a psychologist from the University of Denver who worked on the study. "Clearly a lot more kids are doing this than people have known," according to a report in REUTERS.

For the study, 665 young adults were asked about self-harming behaviors. The study found that 8% of third-graders, 4% of sixth graders and 13 % of ninth graders had hit, cut, burned or deliberately injured themselves at least once.

While younger children most commonly seemed to hit themselves, the elder ones (high school goers) were more likely to cut or carve their skin.

Researchers further revealed that around 1.5 percent of children met the psychological criteria for a diagnosis of non-suicidal self-injury, which meant that the children hurt themselves a minimum of five times and also had a lot of negative feelings tied to the behavior.

The explanation given by the youths for their behavior was that they did so to stop bad emotions and at time to simply feel something when they felt too numb, according to psychologists.

"You can have young kids who are experiencing a lot of emotions, things that they don't know how to deal with it, so they start banging their head against the wall," Hankin said.

Steven Pastyrnak, head of pediatric psychology at Helen DeVos Children's Hospital in Grand Rapids, Michigan says that while a lot of parents conclude the behavior as simply attention-seeking, it could be they are trying to vent out their depression, anger or anxiety.

Researchers said that older children especially hurt themselves in private, leaving little chance for parents to be even aware of it. They say it is always good to pay attention to children's changing behavior and to monitor changes in their eating or sleeping behavior too. They suggest worried parents should talk to a pediatrician.

Stephen Lewis, who has studied self-injury at the University of Guelph in Ontario, told Reuters Health that the reaction of the parents to their child's self-harming behavior is very important and that parents need to show that they care about their children rather than judging them.

"For parents, the first step would be to talk to their child about it, to try to understand what's going on -- what's motivating it, and what might be going on in the child's life that's contributing to it," Lewis said according to the report.

"Clearly the 1.5 percent who are meeting criteria, they're pretty serious," Hankin said. "But even those who are doing it once or twice, hopefully they can get some kind of help, because the concern is that can lead to something further, such as suicidal feelings or generally poor health."

"The bright side is, typically anxiety and depression as well as (self-injury) are very treatable," Pastyrnak, who also wasn't involved in the new study, told Reuters Health.

He added that techniques like muscle relaxation and positive self-talk might help children cope with negative feelings, he added.