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.
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.
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.
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.
I am not what I would describe as a great enthusiast for the alternative health craze. I remember reading when I was a child about the “snake oil salesmen” who precipitated this country’s need for a Food and Drug Administration. Although I’d love to believe that all of our modern snake oil salesmen are well-intentioned, I know that many of them are just out to make a buck from a sometimes desperate and often gullible public.
Fish pills are a simple addition to your child’s diet that may make huge changes in mood regulation.
At the same time, some of our most interesting research on children’s behavioral health is coming out of investigation of things that many in the alternative health world have been saying for a long time: We don’t necessarily have an epidemic of new “disorders” for kids—ADHD, high functioning autism, allergies—what we have is a coming together of various strands of our culture to create problems in our children’s growing bodies.
I will only briefly mention how our children’s lives have changed: from most kids walking to school a generation ago to few walking now, most children playing outside a generation ago to most playing inside on a screen now, from kids getting dirty and engaging in creative play to kids stuck in fluorescent-illuminated classrooms now.
What I want to focus on here are a few dietary changes that can be life-changing for kids with behavioral problems. If your child has behavioral problems, it’s worth considering trying any of these changes to see if there is an improvement.
1) Reactive hypoglycemia and omega supplementation
Omega-3 is so helpful for so many kids, but especially for those fast-talking, fast-metabolizing kids who seem to go up and then crash mid-morning. I wrote an article on reactive hypoglycemia, and another on the effects of omega-3. There’s no reason not to start your child on fish pills today, except, perhaps, for the screaming at the yucky stuff goes down. Some people say that their kids like flavored chewables. My kids hate the flavored ones so we’ve settled on Pure Formulas, which they swallow whole. But I think parents should use whatever their kids are willing to take. You may also encourage your child to eat oily fish, which happily, my children love but many children are unwilling to try.
2) Impulse control and iron supplementation
There is a lot of new research coming out linking behavioral issues with iron deficiency. I have a forthcoming article about this in the 2e Newsletter and I will post a link on my Facebook page when it’s out. If your children have trouble with impulse control and mood swings, get their iron tested, and make sure the tests break out ferritin levels, which is only done if specified. Kids who get ADHD diagnoses seem prone to low ferritin levels, and ferritin is what helps the brain regulate serotonin levels. If their ferritin is low, choose an easily digestible supplement. We use Pure Formulas, but only because it was recommended and doesn’t give my daughter an upset stomach. If she could swallow bigger pills, I might want to go for one of the “real food” based supplements, but they taste awful and are large. (Nope, Pure Formulas isn’t paying me, but perhaps I should send them this blog and see if they will!*)
3) Gut bacteria and probiotics
I have been reading recently, especially in research on autism, about emerging evidence that gut bacteria actually play a huge role in behavior. This was very interesting to me because our daughter’s greatest difficulties happened when she was taking an antibiotic for a congenital urinary system disorder. There are new and very expensive ways to diagnose and treat gut bacteria imbalances, but the easy thing you can you is either have your kids eat lots of live culture yogurts, pickles, and sauerkraut or have them take a probiotic. One of the most interesting papers I read about this showed that kids with gut bacteria imbalances actually seek out the foods that are worst for them, which is something I’ve seen as well. I know that there are a lot of very expensive treatments out there, but as far as I’ve read, their efficacy is not yet proven.
I’m not a doctor or a nutritionist, but it seems to me that the suggestions above should fall into the area of common sense. I find it shocking and more than a little depressing that doctors are willing to diagnose drugs to treat a problem before they suggest trying lifestyle and dietary alterations. I have read that France has a fraction of the number of ADHD diagnoses that we have, simply because they always try lifestyle, education, and dietary alterations first before putting what may be unnecessary drugs into a developing child’s body.
I’m not fond of the snake oil salesmen, and in fact I hate all the noise they make which drowns out the sensible voices in alternative health. But parents can take their own proactive approach, even if their pediatricians persist in sticking with a 1960’s view of medicine and treatment.
* Note: My joke above was just a joke. When I am approached by companies wanting me to hawk their products, I always refuse. I only recommend products either because they happen to fit my family’s needs, or as an example so readers know what to look for. In most cases, a variety of brands will have similar characteristics.
Make Your Worrier a Warrior:
