Got off a red eye flight with my family and my kid said he was hungry, so we agree that I'll get some breakfast stuff with my kid while my wife gets the baggage.
Leave awkwardly holding two coffees and bags of pastries. Everything is fine until we get to the escalator, and here's where I fucked up.
I helped maneuver my kid's suitcase onto the escalator and then because it looked like it might fall over, stepped onto the escalator after it. This would have been fine EXCEPT my kid doesn't like to get on an escalator by himself. So while I began to descend the escalator with the bag, he stayed at the top calling after me, increasingly distressed.
I began running up the escalator the wrong way, still holding the two coffees and now the suitcase as well. I had almost gotten to the top when I slipped, spilling my wife's hot coffee all over the escalator and jamming my knee into the razor-sharp edge of the escalator stairs. Fortunately a kind gentleman helped my kid onto the escalator as I scrambled around the moving, coffee-covered stairs. What became of the other coffee, you may ask? That one was accidentally spilled by my son on the floor where I was sitting a short time later, bandaging my bleeding knee, soaking my butt with coffee.
Long story short, I'm now lying in bed icing my fucked up knee. Fortunately I found some old percocets in the medicine box. The moral of the story is that America must be destroyed
Escalators definitely can cause anxiety and a surprising number of adults don't know how to use them safely. I always stand at least four steps behind people on the up escalator because the number of people that will step off the escalator and just stop while they decide which direction to pick next is shocking.
I think that if you pick a fun place to visit and then do escalator drills, the same way that we teach kids to cross roads safely, then it might help with the anxiety. Also it's something that will hopefully pass on generationally.
Your kid being anxious if elevators reminds me of how I developed a really bad anxiety of electric fences when I was a teenager. Not ideal when I live in the countryside and have to cross and open electric fences to walk my dog, so whenever I was walking without anyone else, I would get on my belly and scotch on the ground under the fence (which were usually like three feet above ground, I could have just ducked).