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The Lessons of Goodnight Moon

30 Dec




“In the great green room
there was a telephone
And a red balloon
And a picture of the cow jumping over the moon.
And there were three little bears sitting on chairs…”




copyright@Edward H. Plimpton, PhD

Movie Worries

30 Dec

Maybe you needed some down time, or maybe the children needed to be occupied so that you could get some other things done, so you allowed them to watch a movie. Let’s say you chose Walt Disney’s Snow White, because it is so well-known and you remember it from your own childhood. The kids watch the movie, you have some time to attend to your business, and everything seems fine. But when bedtime rolls around, there is a problem. The image of the old hag who gives Snow White the poisoned apple is stuck in your child’s head, and it will not go away.

What is going on here? This is just a cartoon, after all, and it was made for children. Nevertheless, it is undeniable that movies can overwhelm some children by presenting them with frightening images from which the motion picture rating system provides only imperfect protection. For some children, the possibility presented in the movie — that people can seem one way but turn out to be another — is a very compelling idea. In addition, movies in which a character actually morphs into something else — movies such as Freaky Friday, Spirited Away, Big, and The Incredible Hulk — can produce intense anxiety. Children are often misled by appearances, and believe exactly what they see, even if it is presented in a cartoon format.

Logic cannot help anxious children reason away their fears. Long ago, the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget did an experiment in which he presented young children with two glasses filled with equal amounts of water. Preschoolers were easily able to see that the two glasses looked the same. However, when he took one of the glasses and, in front of the children, poured its contents into a shorter but wider glass, the children invariably said that the taller glass had more water and the shorter glass had less. Although they had seen the same amount of water poured into a different shaped glass, they still reasoned on the basis of appearance. In other words, it is easy to fool young children into believing that appearances are real, even if you tell them that something is “imaginary,” or created with special effects. So it is wise to use caution in what you allow your children to see, especially those children who are more than ordinarily anxious.

The potential of movies to leave children with anxious preoccupations, of course, isn’t confined to very young children still in the grip of very magical thinking. Older children, teens and adults can be similarly affected. And with regard to some excessively explicit movies our culture produces, it may be reasonable to ask, “Who wouldn’t be freaked out?” At the same time, there are a group of children whose excessive reactivity to movies that their peers can tolerate and enjoy is a reflection of limitations in their own anxiety management capacity. While just saying “No” to movies that are too much is one perfectly acceptable approach, for some children it may result in them missing out in group activities with their peers. For the latter children, learning to build their “Movie Muscles” may be helpful and also build their capacity to tolerate tension and suspense in other areas of their life. A simple way to build “Movie Muscles” is to start with a movie such as Finding Nemo and with the remote control handy, stop the movie whenever your child is showing any fear or signs of physical tension. Ask your child whether he can notice what is happening in his body and then wait for his body to calm down. Then repeat the scene that was just played until the child is less reactive before proceeding with the rest of the movie. This exercise will help build capacity to tolerate the tension and suspense of movies.

copyright@Edward H. Plimpton, PhD

Get out of your head

14 Jul


From Your Anxious Child: Emails to Parents Edward H. Plimpton, PhD



When an anxious thought or image takes hold in your child, it hijacks his attention. In children’s intense preoccupation, a narrowly focused tunnel vision takes hold in which the worry is the only thing in sight. This narrowing of vision makes sense if there were a realistic danger that had to be dealt with. Hitting the reset button involves helping the child get out of her head and refocused onto the world around her. For example, one girl struggled watching movies with her friends because she was much more easily frightened by what she saw compared with her friends. On her own, she came up with the idea that when she was frightened by something she saw, she would look around the room and start naming what things. She would say to herself, “There is the lamp, there is the cat, there is my popcorn…” and this listing would help her reorient and gain some distance from the frightening image.

A slightly different example is provided by a 10-year-old boy who had been anxious about going to school for a long time. There were frequent trips to the school nurse and guidance counselor with complaints about stomach pains. Merely talking about his feelings and providing reassurance didn’t help with his anxiety. Partly in desperation, the guidance counselor started having the child write down his schedule in her office as soon as he got into school. By the time he was finished writing down his schedule for the day in great detail, his anxiety had diminished to the degree that he was able to go to his class without difficulty. This simple exercise did a couple of things. First, the act of writing his schedule down moved him away from his anxious thoughts because he had to think about his schedule, which was not the same every day.  Second, since he was filled with nervous anticipation about what was going to happen during the day, writing his schedule moved him away from the anxious anticipation to visualizing what would really happen during the day. This focus on the external reality of the day seemed to help calm him down. Third, the anxious child is usually operating at high speed, but writing something down can really slow things down so he can challenge some of his anxious thoughts or they can just dissipate on their own.

So helping your child focus on the environment outside of his head can often be an important step in helping him deal with anxious thoughts.

Effort versus Performance

14 Jul

Effort Versus Performance












copyright@Edward H Pllimpton, PhD




How to Panic

14 Jul

How to Panic


Did you know that you can induce an anxiety state? Your child can do it too. And sometimes it helps to know that you can control this process — if you can make anxiety happen, perhaps you can understand it better and help it go away.


Here are some instructions for improving your chances of having a genuine panic attack:


1.)    Breathe in a shallow and rapid manner. In other words, hyperventilate.

2.)    Scan your body for anything that doesn’t feel quite right. It’s especially useful if you can notice some tightness in your chest, but other body parts can do the job quite well. For instance, perhaps your stomach doesn’t feel well, or the back of your throat feels funny. Remember, if you have a strange feeling, or any feeling at all, there is a reason—and it’s probably not a good reason, either.

3.)    Now, take those feelings and use your imagination. Think of the worst thing that could happen. Consider that you might die, have a heart attack or throw up in school. Be sure to think hard about these possibilities and how frightening they are.

4.)    If you have ever had these feelings before, try to forget that they eventually went away. Try to imagine these feelings as being worse than anything that has happened before.

5.)    Hope for a quick fix.


For more straightforward reading on this topic, I would recommend Reid Wilson’s book Panic for adults, and Tamar Chansky’s Freeing Your Child From Anxiety for dealing with children.

Reassurance Questions

14 Jul



Reassurance Questions

Consider these questions: “Will everything be OK?” “Am I going to throw up?” “Are you sure this food is safe to eat?” These are more than just questions. They are simple requests for reassurance, something we all need from time to time. As a parent, providing comfort to a distressed child is one of the things we do best, and with infants we are biologically wired so it happens automatically. But when no amount of reassurance seems to calm your child and you have the feeling that you are dealing with a bottomless pit, different measures are called for.

It is not just information that is needed, because you have provided that and your child is still an anxious mess. In fact, when you are at your wit’s end, it can feel like your child doesn’t think you are a credible source of information. Much of dealing with anxiety involves learning to tolerate uneasiness and recognizing that our prior attempts to feel better don’t work and in fact actually make the situation worse. Without intending it, your repeated efforts to reassure your child have acted like an addictive drug, providing quick relief, but leaving her craving more. What we need to help your child learn is to teach her that when an anxious worry pops into her head, if she leaves it alone, it will go away by itself, but if she gives it serious consideration, it hangs around.

So what to do? Your response needs to be informed by how anxious you gauge your child to be. For the highly anxious child who is near panic, utilize the  breathing techniques to bring down his anxiety, and the two-part sentences discussed in a previous chapter, which involves  empathizing with the feeling, but reminding him  of the facts. These are more management strategies for intense moments when there isn’t too much rational thinking going on. However, it will be more helpful if we can make “anxiety” wait and not respond to it right away. So you might say, “That sounds like a worry monster question, I would like you to wait five minutes and see if you still need to ask this question.” If the child gets busy doing something and forgets about the question, then mission accomplished.  If the child still has the question after waiting the requisite amount of time, then answer the question. The child at the very least has learned to tolerate some discomfort for a short time. With practice, she will be better able to tolerate not having these questions answered automatically — and for most children, the anxiety will diminish. The amount of time you ask your child to “make worry wait” needs to be also gauged to what you think he can tolerate, but the goal is have him tolerate increasingly longer periods of time so that the thoughts truly have a chance of floating away.

She is not worried with me

14 Jul



“She is Not Worried with Me!”

 The expression of worry by a child isn’t necessarily the same in the various places he/she goes during the day. This discrepancy in how the child is perceived is found in scientific studies comparing  ratings of anxiety between school and home in which  these studies  typically do not find much aggreement. Disagreements between parents can occur, which may be magnified if they are divorced. One parent may take the position that the child is being overly indulged and the other perceives the child as quite sensitive and vulnerable. The difference occurs both ways in regard to home and school. For children with selective mutism , they can be chatterboxes at home and yet say not a word in school . Alternatively, there is the child who complains bitterly about going to school, and yet 10 minutes after being left in the classroom is fully engaged. This is a fairly commonplace observation is the reason parents are typically discouraged from prolonging the goodbyes when leaving a child at school. Likewise, there can be a split between the parents in how they understand the child. While both parents may be fully engaged as parents, for typically practical reasons, they don’t spend the same amount of time with the child. As a result, the child may not share his/her concerns equally with both parents. And of course, a child is more likely to share a worry if he/she will not be judged or made fun of for being worried.

What is to be done when observations are not uniform?  First, is to recognize that this is not unusual when it comes to the expression of anxiety, in fact it is quite common. Some worries are only expressed in certain situations. Observations do not have to be uniform to validate that the child is struggling with anxiety. Second, the answer to what to do can be devilishly simple or complex. It can be as simple as following the teacher’s advice and not prolonging the goodbye at school. But there are plenty of children for whom a more nuanced approach is needed and a greater understanding of what the worries mean is absolutely needed.

One step at a time-thinking incrementally

14 Jul

The Incremental Mindset


I share with you the desire to help your child overcome the anxiety that is so much interfering with his or her life. It is hard to be patient when you can see your child in the grip of something that really does not make sense. Understandably, most parents respond to their child’s discomfort with reassurance. It is a natural parental response. Unfortunately, when you are in the “land of anxiety,” no amount of reassurance seems to work, and your child seems like a bottomless pit. So we need some different medicine, and this takes the form of finding a way to face the fear.


There is a delicate balance between pushing your child to confront her fears versus letting her do things at her own pace. Because avoidance behaviors are so reinforcing—they really do provide some short-term relief–chances are that things will get worse, not better, if a child is consistently allowed to avoid anxiety. Avoidance, in fact, actually makes people more afraid in the long run, and becomes a sort of addiction.


As I said, the cure for the anxiety is going to involve finding a way to face the fear, rather than avoid it. However, this needs to be approached carefully. We want your child to master his fears, not be overwhelmed by the interventions that are designed to help him. In most cases, what we need to do is to start with very modest projects and build from there. A very common mistake is to forget to start small. Thinking in incremental steps sounds simple but “impatience” and “frustration” gets in the way potentially for both parent and child. That is in the eagerness to resolve the problem we can get impatient and ask the child to do more than he is ready for or the child may similarily gets impatient . There is also a tendency to devalue the importance of incremental steps by either adults or the child with a comment along the lines of “…but he (I) still can’t…” But that is obviously a mistake for it takes the spotlight away the small successes that can provide hope and encouragement.


At this point, we need to clearly identify the building blocks that each child needs in order to be able to confront fear. Typically it is helpful to make a hierarchical list of the steps it will take to confront a fear or a “fear ladder”. A fear of dogs might begin with looking at pictures or movies of dogs, then observing them outside at a distance and then gradually move closer.  In addition, having a  “feeling thermeter” is important tool in adjusting the pace.   It takes some thought and patience to break a problem down into manageable incremental steps. It is bit like the game of pick-up sticks where you are looking for next stick to take that won’t rattle the pile.  The range of possibilities can vary dramatically from child to child. For some children, just having a clear rationale of what we are doing and why is sufficient. But if we can clearly outline the steps to take, then the journey becomes more tolerable and we can focus on the child’s small victories along the way.

Anxiety is allergic to humor

14 Jul

Use of humor

When I was growing up, I didn’t know about anyone who had a peanut allergy, but now if you ask most children they can tell you about someone who has one kind of allergy or another. For reasons that are not completely understood, allergies seem to have become more prevalent. Well, it turns out, as Michael White, a therapist who really developed the idea of personifying worries and other problems, has stated, anxiety has allergies too. Anxiety is allergic to humor. It wants everything to be taken very seriously. So in dealing with anxiety, we can take a cue from Harry Potter and Prisoner of Azkaban

where in their class on the defense against the dark arts, Professor Lupin instructs the class on dealing with boggarts.


“ ‘So, the first question we must ask ourselves is, what is a boggart?’

    Hermione put up her hand.

  ‘It’s a shape-shifter,’ she said. ‘It can take the shape of whatever it thinks will frighten us most.’”

Professor Lupin goes on to explain:

“‘The charm that repels a boggart is simple, yet it requires force of mind. You see, the thing that really finishes a boggart is laughter. What you need to do is force it to assume a shape that you find amusing’” (p 133-134 Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J.K. Rowling).


A similar point about the power of laughter in dealing with worries came up in the movie Monsters, Inc. where the monsters power their city by capturing children’s nighttime screams. However, a little girl becomes friends with a good monster and toward the end of the movie when a bad monster tries to scare her, she laughs at him, and in an instant all of his power is taken away.


Of course we never want to laugh or belittle the child for his fears, for that would truly make matters worse. However, we do want to engage your child in trying to transform the worry into something less dangerous, and hopefully disarm it. So we might want your child to draw the worry and change it or turn into something silly, perhaps giving it a diaper or a pink tutu. If we can get your child laughing, we are on our way to taming this worry.
Copyright@Edward H. Plimpton

Anxiety is about getting junk mail


Junk Mail



