After a five day vacation for the Thanksgiving holiday, last Monday morning my first thought on waking was the same as the school anxious children I see in my practice. I thought, "If only I had one more day off." But my beagle mix Benny was up early telling me that he was ready for his morning walk (somehow he knows which days are workdays and gets up earlier than on weekends), and I had to hit the ground running to get him out and get ready for work. At least I don't have to deal with anxiety about facing the week, I just wanted one more day off.

But last week was  tough for the majority of the kids I see who have school anxiety. Ten days of not having to leave the safety of home and family , not having to think about the pressures of school, to be able to have fun, fun, fun, along with tons of yummy food, made waking up last Monday morning awful, as many told me. And all of last week, a stream of kids came in to see me who were not happy, and had to face their anxiety again.

So much of what drives anxiety is worry about the future and that worry is made up of mental  images and thoughts that play over and over like a bad movie in our heads. Common worries of school anxious kids look like this:

"What if I leave home and something bad happens to my mom or dad?"
"What happens when I begin to "feel bad " (substitute other words you use for the symptoms of anxiety), and I can't leave school?"
"What if I don't understand the work again?"
"What if I'm teased again?"
"What if my mom/dad forgets to pick me up at school?"
"What if the teacher calls on me in class today and I don't know the answer?"

With these disturbing thoughts going on during a good part of the school day, it's a wonder that anxious children learn anything or are able to have good social interaction with classmates and teachers. Teaching children how to change negative mental chatter into positives is one way to help them build confidence that they can take control of their anxiety. What follows is a technique I use for both younger and older students that has proved to be successful for many kids.

Drawing Out the Fear

Tell your child that you are going to do an exercise with her that will help her to feel calmer in certain situations that make her nervous. Have your child decide on a situation that makes her anxious, for example leaving home to go to school. Ask her to describe in detail what she pictures will happen when she leaves home. Write down what she says, or if she is able have her write it herself. Here's an example from a fourth grade student with separation anxiety:

"On school mornings I get more nervous as I get ready to leave and begin to worry about leaving my mother.  I'm scared something will happen to her  while I'm in school. I also worry that she won't be there at 3:00 to pick me up and take me home."

After this student finished describing her fears, her mother, a stay at home mom, made a list of the things she usually does when her child is at school. Her child agreed to draw a picture of all of the things her mother actually does during the day. So that's what we did in the session, we divided a piece of drawing paper in areas and my client drew her mother: food shopping, cleaning, doing laundry, reading, having lunch, going to the gym, and driving to the school to pick up her daughter. We also added approximate times that these tasks take place so the child had some reference to what her mother was doing during the school day, and in the drawing had mom saying things to her child like, "Hi, I'll see you soon."

This child chose to fold up the drawing and take it to school so she could look at it when her anxious thoughts began, and say to herself, "When I think bad things will happen it's only anxiety, this is what's really happening at home." Eventually she was able to change her picture without looking at the drawing and felt more in control of her anxiety.