Make Your Worrier a Warrior: A Guide to Conquering Your Child’s Fears
by Daniel B. Peters, Ph.D.
Great Potential Press, 2014
I don’t have any world-class worriers in my house, so as I started this new book by the author of Raising Creative Kids, Dan Peters, I wondered how much it would apply to my parenting life. But as is always the case with a well-written, thoughtful book, I found plenty of thought-provoking ideas, inspiration, and creative solutions to a wide variety of problems.
The first thing that happened as I was reading the book was that I realized that although I don’t have a world-class worrier, we have often sailed these waters when it came to individual situations that our children faced. Neither is what I’d call a worrier in general, but both have gone through periods of specific fears, avoidance behaviors, and other issues that are covered in this book.
Peters takes a strong stance right from the beginning that worrying and fear in general is something that therapy hasn’t addressed well in the past. He points out that now that we have such a detailed picture of what physically happens with the fear response, we have much stronger and more targeted tools at our disposal.
The first tool he wields is knowledge: His book trains parents to understand what the fear response is and where it comes from. He offers a picture of why fear happens, what physically happens to a child experiencing fear, and why simply identifying the fear and talking about it is not enough. He also details the various diagnoses that our children might receive related to their fears, while cautioning us not to fixate on the diagnosis itself but rather on how to manage the fear reactions. Using examples from his own practice, Peters shows us that no matter where the fears came from in the beginning, they have a common physical expression that can be identified and targeted.
Peters’ method of choice is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), which addresses the symptoms of the problem rather than trying to find root causes. The bulk of the book is devoted to detailing what this approach is, how it works, and how families can implement it in their daily lives.
Of all that I appreciate about this book, the greatest is the respect and trust that Peters offers his young patients. The book is not about something that parents can do to their children, but rather a manual on forming a partnership with their children of any age to gain understanding of and control over their fear responses. Peters repeatedly stresses that this approach will offer children useful tools, not just to overcome a specific fear but to gain an understanding of living with their brains and overcoming other obstacles they might face.
First, my disclaimer: There are some fathers who are the primary homeschooling parent, but this piece specifically addresses a “mom thing.” As women, many of us have been socialized to feel that it’s our job to take care of everyone else to the detriment of our own health and happiness. Homeschooling dads, please feel free to see yourself in here, too, but I won’t apologize for addressing the moms on this issue.
When I was a teenager, we had something we said in our house that needs a bit of translation. Our mom would make yet another self-sacrificing gesture and one of us would inevitably say, “But I like burnt toast!” That was our way of pointing out that our mom was very quick to deny her own needs in deference to all of ours, and there were lots to defer to. My mom deferred to the needs of a husband, five kids, and sometimes even our menagerie of pets. We teased her that when our old toaster didn’t spit out the toast at the right time and some kid whined, she’d always say, “Give it to me—I like burnt toast.”
Homeschooling moms all want to be Supermom, but we have to take care of ourselves first. Totally excellent illustration by Hannah Carpenter.
Homeschooling moms eat a lot of metaphorical burnt toast. We feel indebted to our spouses for earning the money that allows us to stay home with the kids, so we defer to them. We feel responsible for our kids’ happiness even more than other moms since we have taken on such a central role, so we defer to our kids when we should be taking care of ourselves. We find ourselves so used to taking on other people’s burdens, we often even do it for other homeschooling moms, agreeing to take care of another kid when really, it’s the last thing we need to have another bundle of wants in the house, or agreeing to go on yet another fieldtrip because we don’t want to be the spoilsport.
A lot of what we do is necessary for the job: Many a woman has given up a hard-earned career, or cut back drastically, because of taking on homeschooling. Many a mom has given up a beloved pastime that used to happen during school hours. Many a homeschooling family has had to cut back expenses, which often translates into the mom losing her yoga class, her writing retreat, or her much-appreciated pedicures.
Household economies and the limits of time may be unavoidable, but there is a dark side to all this giving: sometimes Mom gives so much, it actually negatively affects not only her family’s happiness, but their homeschooling success as well.
The way I see it, homeschooling is like the ultra-marathon of parenting. If you aren’t in top shape, eating right, taking care of yourself, you’re not going to make it to the finish line. And so often, a mom deny her own needs, thinking that it will help her family. But instead it injures her family, just like the marathoner who cut down on warm-up time or has been grabbing quick junkfood instead of eating right.
Of course, each mom’s needs are different, but here are what I see as the non-negotiable…
Homeschooling Mom’s Bill of Rights
I have the right to keep my body healthy
I will find some way to negotiate support from my spouse or friends so that I can go out of the house for fresh air and exercise, without kids tagging along. I will take the time to fix myself a decent lunch after making sure the maniacs have been taken care of. I will go to the doctor when I need to, and if I’m sick and need to stay in bed, I will.
I have the right to express myself creatively
I need time off to be the person I was before I was a homeschooler, that person I need to keep intact for when homeschooling is done. My children need to see me modeling a healthy approach to self-expression, whether I create art, dance, or enjoy cooking gourmet meals for adult friends.
I have the right to adult time
Time with the adults I enjoy connecting with is important, whether those adults are other homeschoolers separate from their kids, adults I am continuing friendships with apart from our children, or adults who share common interests. I don’t have to drag our children along when an outing is for me. It’s important that I model healthy self-respect to my children so that they can do the same when they have their own children.
I have the right to love my spouse separately from my children
I chose my spouse as an adult human, not as a baby-producing mechanism, and in order to maintain a healthy relationship, my spouse and I need time to relate as adult humans separate from our children. It will not hurt our children to spend time with friends or at Grandma’s house—it will teach them how to maintain a healthy, loving relationship with their own spouses when they are adults.
I have the right to ask for help from my spouse and children
I will not try to do everything that needs to be done, even though I know that I can do it best. I will negotiate with my family the best way for us to get household chores done so that we can all live in our home comfortably and safely. I will not do other family members’ jobs “just to get them done.” I will insist that we all share the burdens and joys of living in a happy home.
I have the right to be a full person outside of homeschooling
Though homeschooling often intertwines with identity for all of us, I understand that someday homeschooling will end, and I will be left with the me that is left over. If I don’t nurture that person during every day of my homeschooling, I risk being left with a vacuum to fill. I acknowledge that once my children move on, I will need my healthy body, my creative self, my friendships, and my relationship with my spouse to have survived intact.
As a homeschooler, it is my job to put on the oxygen mask first so that I can be the best, strongest, happiest, healthiest mom I am capable of being.
When my children can’t find something of theirs, I always remind them of my method:
“If you always put it away in the same place, you’ll always know where to find it.”
Given that I tend to be forgetful, this is a rule I live by. If I set down my keys on my desk “for just a second” while I grab something I need for a meeting, those keys will sit on that desk until I’m frantic and late. I will search every place that I “know” they could be and the desk will not be one of those places. I will curse myself and promise never to do it again.
Oh, camera, where are you hiding?
Having done this approximately 2365 times—in the last ten years—I have mostly learned my lesson.
Occasionally, I do mess up. Usually it’s with something I don’t have a routine for. One day I set my tea on top of a bookshelf “for just a sec” while I got my other stuff ready to go. When I returned home, there it was…still slightly warm.
And then there’s the case of the Perfect Hiding Place. This is my biggest foible in terms of losing things: I realize I need to put something out of sight for one reason or another and I think of such a brilliant place! That’s a perfect place and it’s so perfect I’ll definitely remember it!
Ha. Such items end up becoming time machines for me. I’ll come across 3 $20 bills stuffed behind a book or a pair of earrings in a jar in the kitchen. The most valuable thing I ever found was not actually mine. When I was in high school, one day I got down a crystal vase that my mom kept up on a very high shelf. It jingled. Inside, I found a gorgeous watch I didn’t recognize.
“Oh, my!” my mother exclaimed. “That was a gift from my parents for my high school graduation. I haven’t seen that in years.”
As a prize for finding it, I got to keep it. And yes, I do keep it in the same place, so I always remember where it is.
This is on my mind because I can’t find my camera. My first reaction was to say, OK, who used my camera? Because although I have my almost-perfect system for not losing things, others in my family have not yet realized how brilliant it is and tend to leave my things in odd places.
But the camera was nowhere to be found. Then I had a vague memory. We were getting ready to go to Greece, readying the house for our housesitters. I noticed that my camera was in its usual place…right at a two-year-old’s eye level. Our housesitters have a two-year-old. OK, I thought, where’s a good place to stick this so it doesn’t tempt him?
And then I found the perfect place to put it! I’d definitely remember where I left it when I got back to Greece.
I guess you know the ending to this story. If you have any ideas, please let me know. Yes, I did look in the piano bench, in that drawer in my dresser that sticks so I only put things I don’t use in it, and in the catbox.
Apparently, my almost-perfect system for not losing things needs a little more fine-tuning.
When my children were small, we were fortunate that our lives intersected briefly with a wonderful woman who was temporarily working as a babysitter. She was a refugee and had gone from being a respected professional in her native tongue to a naive beginner in America. As such, she had the unusual experience of being able to learn from the ground up again, something that most of us are not brave enough to do once we’re adults and have established ourselves in a profession.
Since childcare is an easy occupation to enter when you are a newly arrived foreigner in this country, she made money by working in preschools and babysitting while improving her English so that she could go back to the field she had her degree in, social work. Never having paid much attention to the raising of children, it was fascinating to be included in her process both of learning how to care for children in any culture, and also in looking back at the culture she’d come from with a more critical eye.
One day she told me that the thing that had most impressed her about the interactions in our family was that we talked to our children like they were people. “In my country,” she said, “we just tell them to do things and we tell them in a special voice you use for children.”
She mimicked the sing-songy voice that you’ll hear coming from parents of many cultures. She was right that this voice, as sweet as it may have been intended to sound, is usually used to issue orders.
“OK, Benny, it’s time to take your medicine!” we coo at our kids. “Now Susie, you know we don’t treat our friends that way.”
It turns out that our social-worker-turned-babysitter was on to something that researchers have found marks a huge difference in how families raise their children. Working class families are more likely to exchange only functional speech with their children: Get dressed. Don’t talk that way. Do it like this. Middle class families are more likely to have conversations with their children in which back and forth is expected: What did you do in school today? Do you think Ramona did the right thing when she pulled that girl’s hair? What an interesting idea about stars—I’ve never thought of it that way.
There are, of course, many explanations for this difference, and many examples of families that don’t fit the mold. But mountains of research show that not only is this difference real, but its effects are felt throughout our society.
In general, children of middle class parents hear more vocabulary, get asked more questions, and are listened to more than children in families with lower socioeconomic factors. And this difference isn’t just a matter of how we talk—it explains many of the persistent gaps between the well-off and the poor in this country, especially when you’re looking at families who seem “entrenched” in their class. You find them in any community in this country: The family that never seems to get its kids through high school and keep them out of jail. The family that seems to produce well-educated, functional adults time and again. And both of these families for generations have attended the same public schools, had the same teachers, should have had the same opportunities for advancement.
It’s very fashionable to blame teachers and schools for our societal ills, but it’s also very misguided. Yes, of course, our schools can always do better, and individual teachers are not always a credit to their profession. But when you consider just this one factor—the huge effect that family speech has on children’s achievements later on—it negates pretty much every argument for penalizing teachers financially when they can’t make their kids’ test scores go up.
A teacher friend of mine likes to point out that test scores are tightly correlated to zip codes. That is, unless a neighborhood experiences gentrification or an economic slide, you can pretty much predict a school’s scores by looking at which neighborhoods its students come from. The poor have been priced out of Palo Alto, thus test scores are high. And since the people who clean the houses of those affluent residents of Palo Alto often live in East Palo Alto, their scores are lower.
The frustrating thing about this difference is its persistence: year in and year out, dedicated educators work to help children rise out of the life that they were born into. And though they have successes, year in and year out they see the majority of their students grow up and produce children who are much the same as they were. And in our current edupolitical climate, teachers get unfairly blamed for this persistent gap, as if all of the other factors acting on kids outside of the classroom are unimportant.
The research, however, is clear: What happens at home is deeply tied to children’s achievement at school. (PDF fact sheet) Although teachers can do a lot, they can’t do everything. If we really want to work on the achievement gap, we can’t put it all on the shoulders of overworked, underpaid people who should be our heroes rather than our punching bags. We need a more comprehensive view of child-rearing and education in our society.
This year my son and I decided to use a new and unusual history curriculum in our homeschool. The Big History Project is an attempt to reshape history to be meaningful to kids in the age of information. Rather than focusing just on the wars and conquests of the past, this curriculum attempts to help students understand a context for human history and make sense of their place in it.
One of the first concepts Big History covers is the question of scale. What does it mean to be human in an unfathomably huge and ancient universe? What is our role as a species? What is the importance of the individual and of our achievements?
The Orion Nebula as seen by the Hubble Telescope
I was thinking about how to represent this in a way that makes sense to me. I think a lot about what it means for a human consciousness to be trapped inside a biological body. Our consciousness is so vast—unlike (as far as we know) other animals, we can conceive of the universe. We can imagine a million years into the future or the past. We can study fossils and recreate the life they lived in words, static art, and film.
This vastness of our consciousness leads us, however, to have difficulty in placing our lives in context. Especially when we are children, what’s happening in our heads naturally feels as if it’s the center of things. One of the most fascinating parts of being a parent for me was watching my children define who they are within their own bodies.
First, you have a baby who has only recently separated from being part of someone else’s body. The baby has a desperate need to be touched, as if that little consciousness can’t yet conceive of being its own person. I remember with both of my babies the day they pulled their heads back from nursing and looked up at me with a new curiosity—Hello! Who are you? Who am I?
Then the baby starts to look and move around. Everything in the baby’s life revolves around the baby. Having siblings perhaps makes it a little easier to sense that you’re not the center of the universe, but your needs are still very selfish—throughout the toddler years and for some kids, well into childhood, there is a selfishness in fulfilling desires and satisfying needs. Babies don’t ask, “Is it right that my mother has to drop everything to feed me?” Toddlers don’t ask, “Is this a convenient time for me to throw a tantrum?”
I see the primary years as the time when kids are negotiating these questions: Where do I leave off and other people begin? What rights do other people have over me? What right do I have to influence and involve other people? They start to learn by trial and error (and sometimes with adult help!) how far their consciousness extends and how much they are able to influence the world around them. During this time, kids start to comprehend the true scale of things and realize that their consciousness, though vast, is just one of billions.
And then the teen years. So many parents have trouble dealing with this time when their kids seem to take antagonistic positions just to prove that they are separate, autonomous beings. I agree that it’s hard, but it’s also a thrill to watch a child fully separate and develop into his own person, to start to understand his own consciousness and what he wants to do in this frustratingly brief turn we all get. A successful end to the teen years, it seems to me, is one in which the new adult is prepared to harness the vast consciousness to pursue goals within the limits of her human life. I know that I didn’t end my teens this way, but I hope I can guide my children as well as I can toward that understanding as their eventual goal.
If you’re interested in exploring the topic of scale, here are some cool resources we’ve used:
This video from the Hubble Telescope is a fabulous example of how humans can lack a comprehension of the universe, mistaking a grain of sand-sized spot in our night sky as “empty”
Make Your Worrier a Warrior:
