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.
Judging from the mainstream education news you read, the US is in big trouble. Our students are falling behind. Little countries like Finland and Singapore are going to take over the world with their fantastically well-educated populations. Our public schools are so broken, we should pay corporations and churches to educate our youth instead.
If you only read general interest press, what you don’t read are articles like this one in Education Week, which highlights the startling research that shows we’re doing just fine… most of us, that is. The article focuses on new data that compares students’ achievements in math and science by state rather than aggregated from the whole country. The result is what anyone who is paying attention could tell you: our poorest, most culturally conservative, and/or most economically and linguistically diverse states are, indeed, suffering when compared on a world stage.
When you break down American math and science achievement by region or by socioeconomic factors, you find that American education is not failing—it’s just failing some students in some places. See the study here.
But here’s the good news: in our states where education is well-funded, where kids are relatively well-fed, and where educators aren’t expected to push non-English speaking students through curriculum not designed for their success, we’re doing just fine. More than fine, really. States like Massachusetts, Minnesota, and Vermont “outperformed all but five of 47 countries, provinces, and jurisdictions abroad in mathematics.” In science, top scorers included Massachusetts, Vermont, and New Hampshire.
So are our schools failing or not? It depends on where the school is and who the students are.
I think that in order to understand public education in the United States, you have to understand the United States first. Unlike Finland or Singapore, we are not a small country with a single, central government. Unlike Korea and Finland, we do not have a highly homogenous culture and only one educational approach. Unlike all these countries, we have a huge immigrant population and an enduring underclass of children whose first five years are so drastically different from upper class kids’ preschool years that to expect them to perform well in the same kindergarten classroom is simply silly.
The United States is a republic of states which until recently were left on their own to determine their approach to public education. The differences in how children were educated in this country were very wide until No Child Left Behind, and great differences persist today in the quality of educational approach, even as the core curriculum is becoming more standardized. Thinking of it this way, it’s no surprise that some states vastly outperform others—the same way that some teachers vastly outperform others and some schools do the same.
It’s also very clear, when looking at the list of states that achieve near the top in math and science, that socioeconomic factors matter. The deep South, with its enduring poverty, conservative approach to education, and poor economies supported by handouts from richer states, is not represented in that list.
Also performing badly are some of the band of states along the border with Mexico, burdened as they are with educating large numbers of kids who arrive in kindergarten lacking the English language skills, physical health, and stimulating home environments provided by middle class, educated families.
What this means to me is that we need to stop trying to look at the question of whether the United States as a whole is succeeding in educating our children well. That question is meaningless and doesn’t deserve to be answered. What we need to start doing is to pay more attention to the different educational needs of different populations:
Every study has confirmed the huge effects of poverty on parenting and academic achievement. There is no excuse for us to be talking about cutting expenses like free breakfasts for poor kids if our real intent is to educate all children well. Good education starts with breakfast.
Every educator can tell you that the combination of poverty and immigrant status creates important differences in the needs that children have at school. Yes, we can all point to poor Mexican-Americans who grew up to be judges, but in general, a population of kids with linguistic, cultural, and economic barriers to American-style education needs to be educated differently than kids without these factors. We need to fully fund the education of these kids, and educate them as a resource for rather than a liability to our country.
We need to be frank about the way some of our states are run. States with progressive approaches to education see money being sucked out in the form of federal taxes, which then go out to states sticking with old-fashioned, outmoded educational approaches.
I’d like to see Americans answering the question of how we’re educating kids with a lot more nuance and understanding of where we are coming from, and how we are different from other countries. No other high-achieving country has the burdens we have. No other country of our size has the governmental system that we have. When comparing American schoolchildren to Finnish schoolchildren, I’d like to see the comparison of well-fed, well-educated, middle class Americans only. What sense is there in comparing a Finnish student to an Alabama youth who had never touched a book before kindergarten and arrives hungry to school each day? What sense is there comparing a Korean raised in a highly educated, largely homogenous culture to a poor immigrant American whose parents are struggling just to keep their family intact and fed?
American education is not a melting pot. It’s a beautiful, ugly, creative, hodgepodge, well-constructed, fraying-at-some-edges patchwork quilt. If we really want to “fix” education in America, we need to get to work fixing what’s wrong with the quilt, rather than cutting out what’s right.
Sometime in the last year I clicked on a link from Facebook about a woman who was being harassed because she planned to make a series of videos looking at sexist attitudes perpetuated by video games. Even before she’d made the videos—before she even said what was going to be in them—the Internet erupted against her, with comments ranging from nasty to threatening posted on her site and the Kickstarter page she’d created for her project.
I was playing a video in which she explained what had happened to her, and my teenage son, hearing what I was listening to, hurried in.
“I read a blog about her,” he informed me. “She’s out to swindle people.”
Her name is Anita Sarkeesian, and she has now released a few of the videos she is making about gaming. These first videos are about the “Damsel in Distress” trope, a common one not only in all popular entertainment, but specifically in video games.
My son’s reaction to her was not unusual: he was only voicing what he’d seen spread across the Internet. Anyone who is a feminist and follows what happens to women who speak out knows something like this story: Sarkeesian didn’t even get a chance to speak before they attempted to shout her down. Merely the suggestion that women might take offense at how they are portrayed in video games was enough to start the angry chorus against her: She must be a liar, she must have an agenda, she must be out to get us.
The reality is quite the other way around. The portrayal of women in popular media from the beginning of time has been used to keep real flesh-and-blood women from realizing their potential and chasing their dreams. We have been told that we are weak, stupid, incompetent, over-emotional, and irrational since the beginning of time.
We’re getting a little sick of it. After watching Sarkeesian’s first video, I am thrilled that a young feminist is willing to take this on in an area that we older feminists definitely feel like fish riding bicycles. I have to admit that my interest in video games pretty much started and stopped with Tetris, and the one time my son tried to teach me to play Minecraft, I repeatedly fell into the same hole that I had just painstakingly climbed out of.
So it’s important to listen to young women like Anita Sarkeesian, for whom gaming is an integral part of life.
“The pattern of presenting women as fundamentally weak, ineffective, or ultimately incapable has larger ramifications beyond the characters themselves, and the specific games they inhabit,” Sarkeesian says. “We have to remember that these games don’t exist in a vacuum; they are an increasingly important and influential part of our larger social and cultural ecosystem.”
This is the ecosystem that are children are growing up with, whether they play video games or not. No matter how we shelter our kids from the games themselves, the culture they are part of is infused with attitudes that come from the games, with 97% of all American kids now playing video games on a regular basis.
Sarkeesian’s point is not that we shouldn’t let our kids play these games. Her point is not that any game that displays sexist attitudes is necessarily bad in all ways. And her point is not that all games are inherently sexist.
The point she makes with the first of her videos is that our popular culture reinforces beliefs that have immediate, measurable effects on the kids in our culture. A child who plays a game learns from that game, whether in a conscious way or in the reinforcement of unconscious beliefs and prejudices. Sarkeesian has chosen to take on “women as victim” as her first target.
“It’s a sad fact that a large percentage of the world’s population still clings to the deeply sexist belief that women as a group need to be sheltered, protected, and taken care of by men,” Sarkeesian says. “The belief that women are somehow a naturally weaker gender is a deeply ingrained, socially constructed myth, which of course is completely false. But the notion is reinforced and perpetuated when women are continuously portrayed as frail, fragile, and vulnerable creatures.”
If we want to raise strong girls and boys who accept them as equals, critical appraisals of the games we play is a good first step.
The other day I wrote about how I’m a bit of a skeptic about the exploding field of alternative health. It is so hard to separate the noise of the snake oil salesmen from the soft-spoken voices of reason. But here’s another example of how advances in modern healthcare don’t always happen in the laboratory.
One night I was at a choral rehearsal and overheard one woman asking another for advice about her, ahem, female troubles. I didn’t catch what her symptoms were, but the woman she was asking is knowledgeable about dietary health and answered that she should try supplementing with magnesium.
I know nothing about this company, but I love the image they made to advertise their supplements!
My daughter is now 10. When she was born, I remember to the day how old she was the first time I got one of those headaches. She was six months old, and a few days before my cycle began again after childbirth, I was hit with an amazing headache. It was like nothing I’d ever felt before. I was unable to get out of bed (something extremely unusual for me), and soon began to feel nauseated as well.
Stuck in bed, what did I do? I asked my husband to bring me my laptop, of course. In short order, I figured out that I was having a migraine, the first of my life. Then I found out that some women have this problem associated with their menstrual cycle. The recommendations? Over-the-counter pain medications, and when that doesn’t work, Imitrex.
I dosed myself with enormous amounts of Aleve, and was eventually able to get back out of bed. But from that month onwards, I got my monthly headache.
Some women would have left it at that, I suppose. But I’m not willing to be sent to bed once a month for three days without a fight! So I asked my doctor, and she recommended, not surprisingly, Imitrex. I tried it, and sure enough, it worked. And sure enough, just like the package warned, the other side effects made it so that I was still incapacitated, though my headache was gone.
Step two was my doctor’s recommendation to try Zoloft. Regularly prescribed as an antidepressant, Zoloft is used off-label to cure all manner of hormone-related maladies, I learned. So I tried it. Once again, it got rid of the headaches. Once again, I wasn’t really willing to deal with the side-effects. In this case, I went from my usual highs and lows to some weird, gray version of my life. I was neither sad nor happy, and didn’t much care about what was going on around me. Again, the headaches were cured, but the side effects were not to my liking.
Against my doctor’s recommendations, I gave up taking the Zoloft every day and just dosed myself when I felt a headache coming on. It worked, but I worried about the possible side effects of playing with my hormones that way.
So back to that choral rehearsal. I thought, Hm, magnesium, what harm could it do to take the RDA and see if it helps? Amazingly, it didn’t just help. It wiped out the headaches. Years later, there is still a direct correlation: If I take magnesium, no headache. If I slack off, the headaches return.
Magnesium deficiency is related to factors that promote headaches, including neurotransmitter release and vasoconstriction [51]. People who experience migraine headaches have lower levels of serum and tissue magnesium than those who do not.
However, research on the use of magnesium supplements to prevent or reduce symptoms of migraine headaches is limited. Three of four small, short-term, placebo-controlled trials found modest reductions in the frequency of migraines in patients given up to 600 mg/day magnesium [51]. The authors of a review on migraine prophylaxis suggested that taking 300 mg magnesium twice a day, either alone or in combination with medication, can prevent migraines [52].
So, you may be asking the same question that I ask every time I find out about these associations: Why didn’t my very capable physician have me try magnesium, an element necessary for human health and very difficult to overdose on, rather than two drugs with bad side effects and the potential to damage my health further?
The easy answer is just that she doesn’t know. I am placing great hope in the advent of connected computerized health to fix this problem. No single doctor can know everything about modern medicine at this point, so we need computer systems to help them out. My doctor’s office is equipped with a wonderful computer system, which could be enhanced to offer her suggestions. (She can already look things up, but I don’t remember if she bothered to look up migraines when I came in to see her.) A well-made computer system, when a doctor types in “migraine,” will pop up information that the doctor may not know, such as the relationship between magnesium intake and migraines.
The more complex answer is one of the reasons that so many people are turning away from science and toward the snake oil salesmen: our medical system is too much in the grips of large pharmaceutical companies who inundate our doctors with gifts and freebies. Want Zoloft? Your doctor probably has free samples lying around. Wonder what Imitrex is? Your doctor is much more likely to know the name of this brand name drug than the uses of a good old, homely element like magnesium.
Of course, as consumers flock to alternative medicine, large companies are taking over alternative medicine and steering patients to make just as irrational, and sometimes life-threatening, decisions as the patients of doctors who steer them to name-brand drugs.
But here is what I feel to be a wonderful coda to this story: Last year, a friend was having unusual and severe symptoms having to do with her menstrual cycle. Her symptoms had nothing to do with migraines and in fact were not located in her head. However, after she told me her tale of woe involving multiple tests and different drugs, I suggested that she try magnesium. Couldn’t hurt, right?
Recently, I asked her. It turns out that magnesium has completely solved the symptoms that modern drugs made no dent in. And besides that, she noticed that a co-worker posted that she was out sick because of similar problems, and she suggested magnesium which solved her co-worker’s problems as well.
One day, our doctors’ computers will tell us which dietary modifications to make before the doctors suggest treatment with drugs.
Until then, I guess it’s got to be women helping women, one headache at a time.
Searching for Meaning: Idealism, Bright Minds, Disillusionment, and Hope
by James T. Webb
Great Potential Press
Dr. Webb’s work has been very important in my life. The day I picked up A Parent’s Guide to Gifted Children is the day that I started to learn about my children—and myself. This was the first parenting book I’d read that admitted that children are different, that families are different, and that it’s not only OK to be different—it’s OK to acknowledge that you are different. And it’s not only OK, but also necessary, to know who you and your children are if you are going to get on with the business of living fulfilling lives.
Dr. Webb’s work with gifted children necessarily led him to the next step: what happens when gifted children grow up? In common belief, giftedness = high achievement. So a gifted child is only gifted by virtue of his or her high grades, and once school is over, somehow we all become “the same.” Yes, some of us as adults are achievers, but it doesn’t matter whether we were whiz kids in school or dropouts who made it big later in life—giftedness is not supposed to matter anymore.
What Dr. Webb has noticed, however, is that the brain that makes gifted children more excitable, more prone to being misdiagnosed with disorders, highly sensitive, and socially unusual does not disappear with adulthood. It’s that same brain, but more developed, more in control. The girl that screamed when she went into a room with bright lights becomes the woman who wears tinted glasses and has found a way to avoid working in office buildings. The boy who kept being sent to the principal’s office because he couldn’t sit still when he was excited about what he was learning has become the man who paces his office and talks to himself when he’s solving a difficult problem. We didn’t suddenly stop having a different brain because we grew up; we simply learned to shape a world that fit our needs.
But that ability to shape the world has its limits. Yes, the woman who is sensitive to light can wear tinted glasses, but if she’s sensitive to violence it’s hard for her to avoid knowing about the violence in this world. The man who paces his office has control of his part of the project he’s working on, but he doesn’t have control over the exploitation of the workers who make the computers he programs. We figure out a way to cope, but sometimes coping is not enough. When you have a brain that works on overdrive, it’s not easy to turn it off at your convenience.
Searching for Meaning is not an easy book. I have to admit, it’s not a book I would have picked up while browsing in a book store. Disillusionment? Hm, maybe I should go for something lighter. Existential depression? Gotta go, I’m late for an appointment. Admitting that what made me a “smart kid” is still intrinsically part of how I interact with the world? Not likely. But despite the fact that I would have avoided this book—perhaps because I would have avoided it—I really appreciate having read it through to the end.
The book takes an analytical approach to the problem by first dissecting it. What is a gifted child? What is a gifted adult? Webb devotes ample space to questioning what makes us who we are. He then lays out the base that the rest of the book builds on: Our overexcitabilities lead us to be idealists; our idealism leads us to want to change the world; our attempts to make things better will eventually lead us to realize that there are limits to what we can do; facing our limits can sometimes lead us to question what our lives are worth.
Dr. Webb could have made this a gloomy book, indeed. However, by laying the foundation of why so many bright minds find themselves confronting disillusionment and depression, he is then able to build on this understanding to help us climb back into the light. Using the different points of view of a variety of thinkers through the ages, Dr. Webb shows ways that we can view what we’re experiencing through a new lens. He offers new ways of looking at what might seem to be a bleak landscape, and cautions us against coping mechanisms (anger, narcissism, avoidance) that become destructive even as we think we are protecting ourselves.
Finally, Dr. Webb offers us the challenge to view our idealism and sensitivity as an asset, to find coping mechanisms that improve our lives and the lives of others, and to aim for hope, happiness, and contentment in a world that desperately needs more of all three.
If you think it’s uncomfortable admitting that your child is different and has different needs, magnify that 20-fold to admit that about your adult self. Dr. Webb’s current mission is to remind us that our brains — no matter which type we ended up with — still need TLC once we move into our adult lives. Dr. Webb’s mission is to understand the needs of brains we called “gifted,” but this book takes its place in a greater striving to understand all different aspects of humanity now that we have the tools to do so.
We are all different. We do have our own needs. Dr. Webb’s brave book encourages one segment of “special needs adults” to learn more about caring for their singularly overexcitable brains.
Make Your Worrier a Warrior:
