‘A Little Spot of Anxiety’

By Kaity Sollenberger

Today in Post 4 in our series on anxiety Schreiber Behavioral Health therapists suggest a book to read with your child.

Here’s the list of all the posts:
Post 1: What is Worry
Post 2: How the Autonomic Nervous System works
Post 3: How worry affects our bodies
Post 4: A little spot of anxiety
Post 5: How worry affects our thinking
Post 6: Other calming strategies

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Anxiety can be a hard emotion for children and adults to understand because it is considered a complex emotion. Anxiety can be a mix of many different emotions, including worry, nervousness, fear and sadness, to name just a few. The interesting thing about anxiety is that is can also protect you. Feeling anxiety can be healthy in small doses, but when anxiety gets too big it can be really hard to understand and manage. “A Little Spot of Anxiety,” by Diane Alber, is a great book geared toward school-aged children that explains what anxiety is and how is can affect your body sensations. This book also suggests different activities and strategies in order to help manage your anxiety.

Remember, children need to be coached and guided through regulation of all emotion, including anxiety. This is called co-regulation. In other words, model how to appropriately regulate through your anxiety. First and foremost, make sure you are regulated, then you can help to co-regulate your child. Our goal is to regulate the child, relate to how they are feeling, and then instruct and teach.

Here is a YouTube link to watch a reading of the book.

Kaity Sollenberger is a behavioral health therapist at Schreiber.