Mary Kostka walks through a workbook that helps kids manage anxiety using drawings, body maps, and a "worry time" schedule with parents. The book uses metaphors like seeds growing into worries and personifies anxiety as "worry bullies" to make the concept concrete for children.
Hey, everyone, I want to share with you this really neat book that we like to use here at Ohana ot and it is called the what to do when youn Worry Too? A Kid's Guide to Overcoming Anxiety. And it's written by Don Hueger. And it starts out. I'm just going to kind of give you a little overview. Kind of starts out with about, are you growing worries? And it starts out that you talk about, like, if you've planted a seed before and how you've watered it and watched it grow. And when it grows and grows and grows, you get a lot of it. And so, like, the first activity is you're gonna draw something that you've helped grow. So they kind of get the idea of when you feed something, it grows. So it has kind of this story component to it kind of goes around, defines what is a worry. And like I said, there's different activities. So here's something where you're going to draw something that you worry about and then kind of talks about how worries get started. And here you're going to list the people you know who worry a lot. And this is kind of neat. This part's going to go over, like, how you feel when you're worried. And you can mark different parts of your body how you feel. And then some. Somebody got mad at you when you were worried. And then there's a whole section on helping worries go away. This is where you write down one of your worries and goes over, like, things that you can say or do to help them go away. And then this is kind of an interesting section on spending less time on worries. There's actually a section here where you establish an actual worry time. So it's when you're going to have, like, this little worry sign where you can actually. This is a time where mom and dad are going to actually sit and listen to whatever your worries are with no interruptions. But you're only going to have a designated amount of time to talk about it. So the idea is to kind of try to spend less time, but have an opportunity to actually talk about your worries. And then here's another drawing activity. And this is kind of talking back to your worries, like, telling them to go, basically. And then they have the worry bullies. They're pretty cool. Sometimes we'll call them worry bugs. And then you draw what yours looks like. Isn't that how they lie to you? So here's where they're going to write down kind of what you can say to your worry bully. And then here's a list of things you can do while you're ignoring the worry. You get the idea. It's a pretty, pretty neat book. Oh here, I like this one. Draw the worry giving up and going away so you kind of, kind of make it into a character so there's a little more to it but you get the basic idea. There's just a lot of great components in here to helping kids kind of work through their worries and we really love it. Sometimes we'll kind of just work on it in conjunction with the parent that they'll buy the book and do it at home and then we'll do some of the pages at Ohana or sometimes we'll just work through the whole book at Ohana, sit down during part of our session and do it. And it's been a really great help for those monsters under the bed or whatever they're, whatever they're worried about or afraid of. Okay, great. Have a good day.
