The
potentially crippling anxieties that children can suffer are, all
too often, dismissed as shyness, laziness or simply something that
the child will soon grow out of. However, once an anxiety has taken
hold, it can develop into something that can, and often does, come
to dominate the child’s life well into adulthood.
Helping
Your Anxious Child, written by Dr David Lewis, a lecturer and an established
stress consultant with a string of best-selling self-improvement books
to his name, offers a clear, sensible guide to identifying anxieties,
fears and phobias the child may be suffering and teaches numerous
strategies that can be employed to cope with, and eventually, banish
those fears for good.
Anxiety
control
With
children as young as four or five exhibiting signs of anxiety, and
with as many as six out of ten teenagers suffering from some form
of stress-related problem, the book makes the point that almost the
whole range of anxieties, fears and phobias can affect children as
badly as adults. Helping Your Anxious Child offers a number of anxiety
control procedures that can be employed with the under-eights as well
as techniques that can be used to help older children and even their
parents.
Aimed
primarily at parents, but valuable to a whole range of carers, the
book takes a calm and measured approach to the process of identifying
those often hidden or displaced fears and phobias that may have only
shown themselves in altered behaviour where a normally outgoing child
has inexplicably become withdrawn, insecure and uncommunicative. The
author sets out to establish whether your child is suffering from
anxiety and, if that is the case, pinpointing the nature of that anxiety
through a series of questionnaires, picture tests and gentle probing.
Once
an anxiety is indicated, the book moves on to discuss ways to identify
the specific anxiety the child is suffering and ways to ensure that
emphatic and positive listening by parents and carers are used to
help the child articulate the problem. With, in general, parents only
taking on board a quarter of what their children are telling them,
these are important skills to learn. “Don’t be so silly”,
words sometimes used to calm a child’s fears can, in fact, have
a devastating effect, isolating the child from the people who can
help and resulting in a reinforcing of the problem.
Relaxation
techniques
Much
of Lewis’s approach revolves around using relaxation techniques
to reduce the tensions in the body that contribute to the anxiety.
For adults and children over eight he outlines muscle-focussing techniques
which involve tensing and relaxing various muscle groups, coupled
with the visualising of pictures chosen to deepen the feeling of calm,
or perhaps to enhance some other positive emotion. He describes the
use of Mind Movies, which link the mid and body in the battle.
To
combat the specific anxiety problem for an under-eight Lewis recommends
the use of Active Imagination, where the child pictures a scene where
a great deal of energy is expended – for example visualising
winning a school sports day race by inches – and then get them
to experience the feeling of deep relaxation that ensues. For those
children that may have difficulty in visualising scenes the author
suggests that the more energetic Puppet Dance is used to teach the
same feeling of relaxation. Building on this feeling is one of the
major keys to overcoming the problem.
The
under-eights can also benefit greatly from the mental images that
are suggested - such as Floppy Bear, Fearless Tiger and Happy Hound
- to help them switch instantly to a positive or relaxed frame of
mind. These are all simple but powerful techniques.
Self
image
All
the techniques can easily be discussed with the child and pitfalls
are outlined so that these can be met as and if they arise. A bonus
for adults is that they can adopt some of the techniques for themselves
and reduce their own stress while helping their child work towards
a more positive self-image and increased self-confidence.
The
road to a fear-free lifestyle may be bumpy with pitfalls and problems
for an anxious child but this is a book that can certainly help smooth
the way.
‘Helping Your Anxious Child’ by
Dr David Lewis; £7.99; Vermilion
