Kids with Anxiety

For many children, riding the school bus, taking a test, or even going to school can trigger some anxiety. Social activities, such as birthday parties, sleepovers, dances and dating, can also make kids feel anxious. Personally, I think severe anxiety is one of the worst feelings in the world.

It can be disabling. Kids have described it to me as feeling like there’s a brick in their stomach, as if they’ve done something wrong or something bad is going to happen. Many adolescents describe it as feeling like something is eating at them and they can’t stop it and it scares them, or like they're waiting for the other shoe to drop.

As a cautionary note, it needs to be stated that when dealing with severe anxiety, be sure to have your pediatrician rule out any medical issues that may cause anxiety to make sure it's not a problem with physical origins.

That being said, anxiety is the emotion we experience in a wide variety of ways when we’re uncertain about what’s happening, or we feel like we can’t control the events that are about to happen. Fortunately, most adults learn to manage this anxiety in a way that allows them to function effectively and live successfully in society.

Anxiety is really the 21st Century word for fear, although people don’t always associate it that way. Survival is probably our strongest primary instinct. And our instincts produce energy in the form of feelings. One way to understand the feeling of anxiety is to think of survival as a “fight or flight” mechanism.

Survival is the engine, anxiety is the gas—it gives you the energy to actually do the fighting or running. For people who have problems managing anxiety, it feels like their bodies are revving up, but there’s nowhere to go.

That’s why they talk about feeling nervous, jumpy, uptight, or out of control. The problem is, most kids don’t know how to process their anxiety, so it goes unchecked. And many times, it ends up feeding on itself and building.

Have regular family meetings with kids.

This is important for all families, but is particularly helpful for single parents as it serves to provide structure. Sit down once a week and focus on what’s happening in the family. I advise parents to start the meeting with compliments, verbalize those, and then focus on solutions to problems that are cropping up together. You might say, “Jack, I really appreciate the way you’ve been keeping your room clean lately. Nice job.”

Go around the table and have everyone say something good about each person present. Then work together as a family to set new rules. For example, maybe there’s been a lot of name-calling in the house. Your rule that week could be, “I want to stop the name-calling. It’s hurtful and I want it to stop.”

Then, if it happens again later on that week, you can say, “Name calling is really a problem for me. I think it is hurtful and disrespectful. I would really like your help. What ideas do you have to solve the problem? Let’s brainstorm and see how many ideas we can come up with and then we’ll choose one that works for everyone.”

With family meetings, kids feel needed, empowered, and motivated to meet their responsibilities. They feel listened to, valued, taken seriously. Kids rebel if they perceive that we keep trying to take their power away. We need to start training young children to use the power they do have by coming up with a solution that’s respectful of everyone.

That’s why I love family meetings. It teaches them to contribute and use their power in useful ways. Do it once a week without fail, make it the most important date on your calendar so kids will know it, too.

You can also use your family meetings to come up with ideas for activities you’d like to do with your children—everyone can give a suggestion. Even though time is at a premium for single parents, be sure to remember to plan time for fun. It doesn’t have to cost money or even take that long to do.

Play Frisbee in the park, play a game, but try to schedule regular, fun activities with your kids. This will help you strengthen your family, and puts you on the road to single parenting success.

Advice to those who are flying solo

2. Give up your guilt.
What you believe, your kids will pick up on. If a single parent feels guilty about the dissolution of the marriage, their ability to provide financially, or any other reason, kids will work that. But if a parent says “This is the way it is for us, we’ll make the best of it, we’re going to do just fine,” the child picks up on that confidence, security and commitment instead. If the single parent feels guilty and thinks they have to “make something up” to their children, the kids can start to feel either deprived or entitled.

3. Let your kids know they’re needed in the family.
One of the biggest problems with children today is that they’re not “needed” in the family. They’re not given enough responsibilities and are not expected to meet the ones they have. But a single parent can truthfully say, “We’re a team, we can share the responsibility.”

Give your kids opportunities to feel needed and valued. Give them real responsibilities in the home such as helping with laundry or dinner (depending upon the child’s age.) Single parents can look at this as an opportunity, and say, “Wow, I really do need my kids.”

4. Solve problems together.
Our theme in the Positive Discipline books is focusing on solutions with your children. The more you get them involved in “What’s the problem and what’s the solution?” the more they’ll feel motivated to follow those rules. I think problems come up when parents start to dictate the rules, and single parents may feel they need to be more punitive to keep control. We’re so afraid that if we don’t add punishment, we’re letting the child get away with something.

I believe in allowing children to experience the consequences of their choices. Don’t “ball them out and then bail them out.” If your child is careless, leaves his bike in the driveway and it gets run over, a parent might punish him by saying, “OK, I’m not buying you a new bike and you can’t ride your bike anymore this summer.” But they’ve already experienced the consequence: they’ve experienced loss or sadness by losing the bike.

Instead, if you focus on solutions with your children, you can help them be more responsible. So now you can say, “I’m willing to sit down and work with you on how you can earn some money to buy a new bike.” You don’t punish or rescue them—it’s not about permissiveness. You come up with a solution together. It’s a matter of being aware so you can focus on solutions.

Single Parent

Jill is a single mom of a nine-year-old daughter, whom she’s been raising by herself since Haley was an infant. “The hardest part about being a single parent is having no one else there when Haley acts up. It’s all me. She doesn’t listen to me, and then I just don’t know what to do. I’m really getting anxious about her teenage years. I’m not sure if I can keep her on track by myself, she’s so willful.”

Jill is far from being alone. Single parenting is one of the toughest jobs on the planet, yet more than 50 percent of households in America are headed by just one mother or father. Much of the time that parent is working full-time and trying to maintain the home, in addition to everything that comes with parenting a child.

To make matters worse, often single moms and dads, like Jill, report feeling as if their children aren’t listening to them or following family rules. Coupled with the guilt that many single parents feel, this can be a one-two punch to the faith you have in the job you’re doing as you raise your kids on your own. So what can you do to maintain confidence in yourself and peace in your home?

Empowering Parents spoke with Dr. Jane Nelsen, Ed. D., the author and co-author of 17 acclaimed books on parenting, including Positive Discipline for Single Parents, and she offered this advice to those who are flying solo:

1. Remember that two is a family.
One single parent with one child, that’s a family. In society, just about everything is blamed on single parents and broken homes, and it’s really sad because it’s just not true. The most important thing is not the number of parents in the home, but the parenting.

We always ask people, ‘Don’t you know single parents who have raised great kids?’ So instead of thinking, “We are a broken home,” say, “We are a single-parent home”— it’s just a different kind of family. I think a lot of being a successful single parent lies in your perception. By that, I mean single parents often think it’s more difficult for them.

It’s so easy to think the grass is greener on the other side, and yet when you have a two-parent family, your spouse might not be that supportive: There’s usually one parent that prefers to be more strict and one that’s more lenient, and then they fight about who is right.

A big part of changing your perceptions about single parenthood is if you see your situation differently. Try to see your family’s situation as an opportunity rather than a negative. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying there aren’t any difficulties in being a single mom or dad, but there are advantages to keep in mind as well.

What is Intelligence Dependent On?

The relationships among family size, birth order and intelligence have been the subjects of much earlier research. However, most of that previous research has been limited by problems of evaluating within-family models using only across-family measures. For example, family size is an "across-family" measure, while birth order is a "within-family" measure.

According to the authors, earlier research on the issue of a link between birth order and intelligence lead to spurious conclusions, one of them being an apparent link between both birth order and offspring intelligence and family size and offspring intelligence. These "links", according to the authors, were caused by mistaking across-family effects for within-family effects.

"There are many good reasons why parents might consider limiting their family sizes, but the belief that, for a particular set of parents in a modern country like the United States, a larger family will lead to children with lower IQs appears to be, simply, wrong. The belief that birth order acts directly to decrease the intelligence of children born later in a given family also appears to be, simply, wrong," state the authors.

Family Size

Contrary to popular belief, having more children born into a family does not necessarily result in lower-IQ children. In their study, the researchers looked at data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY), which gave them the opportunity to look at a large random national sample of families that included children whose academic performance had been reviewed multiple times throughout their academic careers.

The NLSY originated in 1972 as a household probability sample of the nation's youth ages 14-22. For 22 years the sample followed 11,406 young people at yearly intervals. Starting in 1986, the children born to the original female respondents were surveyed every other year. The family structure measures and intelligence scores of these children provide the basic data used in this study.

Train your child by taking small steps first

I think if parents have a child who acts out in public, you want to try what’s called a “slow immersion.” So in other words, if this kid can’t handle going to the mall, take him to the drug store first. Say, “Let’s see how you handle this. We’re going in for five or ten minutes.”

Lay the rules down. That way you’re not at the mall, you’re in a more manageable location and you’re close by your child. Start to train them by taking small steps, by coaching them in little pieces: little pieces of learning how to socialize and solve problems and act like everybody else.
Write the Rules Down and Keep Them Handy.
Before you even go into public, I think you need to decide what your limits are for your child in terms of behavior. Let them know exactly what’s going to happen. For pre-teen kids and under, keep a 4x6 index card in your car with 3 rules on it:

1. Respond to first request.
2. Accept “no” for an answer.
3. Don’t raise your voice or misbehave physically.

Read that card in the car before you go inside the mall or store. That one small act is going to help your child keep it together; reading the rules to them is like lending them structure. You can’t assume that kids are going to recall information that will help them change.

Here’s another way of looking at it: Let’s say you’re speeding and you get a ticket. The assumption is that the next time you’re in a hurry, you’re going to remember how it felt to pay that ticket and you won’t speed. Even though that may be true, each state still has the speed limit posted every five miles. So give your child consistent reminders that will keep them focused.