Growing Up Brave: Expert Strategies for Helping Your Child Overcome Fear, Stress, and Anxiety by Donna B. Pincus

Author:Donna B. Pincus [Pincus, Donna B.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Non-Fiction
ISBN: 0316125601
Publisher: Little, Brown
Published: 2012-08-28T00:00:00+00:00

Fortune-Telling

Children with generalized anxiety are often great fortune-tellers, certain that they can predict what’s going to happen, and what’s going to happen will be the end of the world. Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) is super-future-oriented. Nothing has actually occurred yet or did occur in the past to suggest that it will, but the child is anticipating impending doom. GAD is very much in the mind, whereas with other anxieties, the focus is more specific or on objects—dogs, bugs, social encounters, separation.

Like Eddie, the boy in chapter 2 whose parents called him “the house policeman,” these children typically have a laundry list of negative thoughts: Is there enough food in the house for dinner? Suppose it rains on our vacation? Where is the nearest hospital? Can we afford to move?

The catastrophizing element is huge. For example, many kids with this kind of erroneous thinking brood constantly about their own health or the health of their family members. One child and his parents and siblings had dinner at McDonald’s. On the way home, mom said she had a little stomachache. For days afterward, the boy imagined the worst (she had cancer, she was going to die). His mom said she felt fine, she probably had just had too much to eat. He was not reassured.

With a fortune-telling youngster, I talk about the fact that none of us can really predict the future, or perhaps can do so in only limited ways. I’ll have the child write down all his worry thoughts, and then we methodically go through the list to try to figure out which are thinking errors and which might be worth a tiny bit of worrying but not that much.

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