An endless series on anxiety in children in Terri's local paper makes it clear that parents should worry more about worrying, so we thought we'd take stock of the anxiety levels in our own families to see if we're on-trend. We chatted about the many ways that anxiety can manifest, the hardiness of the worry gene that even gets passed down in adoptive families, the wisdom of blocking WebMD on your browser, and the parfait of anxiety we whip up when we worry about our children worrying about our worries.
In search of a little relief, we looked at the life-improvement advice our own mothers passed down to us. Among the recommended remedies: Go for a walk, drink more water, eat more alfafa sprouts, and preemptively worry about every bad thing that might happen so as to magically prevent it.
Finally, we passed on our own advice about what you should be checking out this week. Catherine recommended the book and CD Sitting Still Like a Frog: Mindfulness Exercises for Kids (and Their Parents) by Eline Snel as a serious anti-anxiety strategy and the song “Rub Some Bacon On It!" as a silly one (to which Terri added Ron Swanson's solution to dealing with disappointment); Amanda celebrated Understood.org's nomination for a Webby and asked us all to vote; Nicole suggested the book The Behavior Code Companion: Strategies, Tools, and Interventions for Supporting Students with Anxiety-Based or Oppositional Behaviors by Jessica Minahan for its help in identifying the many different ways anxiety may look in different children; and Terri gave a testimonial for The Anxiety Cure for Kids, a book with a cognitive behavioral therapy approach that helped her daughter slay the anxiety dragon, or at least shut him up a little.
Thanks as always to Jon Morin for producing our episode and Kristin Eredics for our happy in-and-out music. (If you're reading this description somewhere without hyperlinks, come to http://parentingroundabout.com for the full recap experience.)