Calming Your Anxious Child

Words to Say and Things to Do

Kathleen Trainor

• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781421420110
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Pediatric Medicine

Practical, effective steps for parents to take as they help their child overcome anxiety.

Ten million children in the United States—two million of them preschoolers—suffer from anxiety. Anxious children may be afraid to be out of their parents' sight; they may refuse to talk except to specific people or under specific circumstances; they may insist on performing tasks such as brushing teeth or getting ready for bed in a rigidly specific way. For many children these difficulties interfere with doing well in school and making friends as well as with daily activities like sleeping, eating, and bathing. Untreated anxiety can have a devastating effect on a child's future emotional, social, academic, and work life. And since most kids don't naturally outgrow anxiety, parents need to know how to help.

In Calming Your Anxious Child, Dr. Kathleen Trainor builds on cognitive behavioral therapy to provide practical steps for guiding parents through the process of helping their children manage their anxieties and gain control over their worry-based behaviors. Dr. Trainor's method involves identifying the anxieties and the behaviors, rating them, agreeing on what behaviors to work on changing, identifying strategies for changing behaviors, noting and charting progress, offering incentives, and reinforcing progress.

Combining family stories with practical advice and support, Calming Your Anxious Child teaches parents and caregivers how to empower their children to overcome their worried thoughts and behaviors. Children who have generalized anxiety, OCD, social anxiety, separation anxiety, phobias, or PTSD can all benefit from Dr. Trainor's method, which also helps parents move from feeling controlled by their child's anxiety to feeling that they are in control of their family's future.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Prologue. Anxious about Anxiety: Responding to a Call for Help
• Chapter 1. Fighting Anxiety: Applying CBT with a Step-by-Step Approach
• Chapter 2. Stepping Up to the Challenge: How the 7-Step TRAINOR Method Works
• Chapter 3. Daytime, Bedtime, Worry, Worry: Generalized Anxiety Disorder
• Chapter 4. Silent Liza and Hidden Patrick: Selective Mutism and Social Anxiety
• Chapter 5. Where Are You, Mom and Dad? Separation Anxiety
• Chapter 6. Tap, Check, Count, Wash, Repeat: Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD)
• Chapter 7. Scared to Death: Specific Phobias
• Chapter 8. When Bad Things Happen to Good Kids: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
• Chapter 9. And There’s More: Hair Pulling, Skin Picking, Tics, Picky Eating, and the Like
• Chapter 10. Easier Said Than Done: When More Help Is Needed
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index