Bridget Flynn Walker - Anxiety Relief for Kids: On-the-Spot Strategies to Help Your Child Overcome Worry, Panic, and Avoidance

Bridget Flynn Walker has written a timely book. In our busy pediatric practice, we are seeing an increased number of children with anxiety these days. For parents and professionals alike, she clearly defines the different faces of anxiety, and strategies that can be used to help our children and patients overcome them.

Mary D. Piel, MD, pediatrician at Golden Gate Pediatrics in San Francisco, CA

This book is a terrific resource for parents of anxious kids! Parents want to know what to do and what not to do to help their child with anxiety. Walker explains how trying to comfort your child can actually be feeding their anxiety. She offers up clear and powerful tools that parents can use with their child that will help them now and for the rest of their lives.

Jennifer Shannon, LMFT, author of The Anxiety Survival Guide for Teens

With warmth and wisdom, this valuable book provides hope and empowerment to parents. Bridget Flynn Walker provides a clear and easily readable understanding of what makes anxiety worse, and scientifically-proven strategies for managing anxiety. Most importantly, she provides a practical road map that parents can follow to help their children become braver and more confident in tackling their fears.

Aureen Pinto Wagner, PhD, director of The Anxiety Wellness Center in Cary, NC, and author of Worried No More

Just what the doctor ordered! A clear, concise, and practical guide to help parents help their children master their anxieties. I am confronted with patients and their parents every day who are searching for guidance in managing their childrens omnipresent worries. The cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) strategies outlined are easy to understand and straightforward to implement. This book provides a real-life tool kit that will help families and their physicians ease the fears that children often have.

Laurel J. Schultz, MD, MPH, community pediatrician at Golden Gate Pediatrics, and volunteer associate clinical faculty at the University of California, San Francisco

Bridget Flynn Walkers book, Anxiety Relief for Kids, provides an invaluable resource for parents and mental health professionals to help children manage and overcome anxiety. The books approach is clear, concise, and informative. This step-by-step guidefull of evidence-based strategies to implement with childrenuses easy-to-understand language, and offers vivid examples and helpful worksheets which make the book simple and effective to use.

Anya Ho, PhD, clinical psychologist at the San Francisco Group for Evidence-Based Psychotherapy

This book is a much-needed resource for parents of kids with anxiety. It outlines essential psychoeducation about anxiety, and how to tackle its treatment. This book can help empower parents towards addressing their kids anxiety and give them the essential tools needed to be successful.

Natalie Todd, PsyD, clinical psychologist at the University of California, San Francisco, working with teens and young adults

Bridget Flynn Walkers book tackles a complex and vexing problem for so many families, providing simple and easy-to-learn methods that will ease your childs anxiety and boost confidence. Anxiety Relief for Kids is a go-to resource for parents or anyone else trying to help a child with excessive anxiety. I recommend it highly.

Eli Merritt, MD, founder of Merritt Mental Health

This little gem of a book offers useful information for parents who are first learning about anxiety in their children. The book is highly approachable, and synthesizes much of the currently available information on child anxiety and evidence-based treatment strategies. Parents will particularly appreciate the friendly and unassuming language, and the real-life examples that bring many familiar dilemmas to life. The section on how not to feed your childs anxiety will be especially useful for parents wondering how to help their child feel less anxious without contributing to the kind of unhelpful avoidance that maintains the problem. Bridget Flynn Walker has a clear voice and a knack for explaining ideas so that they just make sense.

Eli R. Lebowitz, PhD, associate director of the Anxiety and Mood Disorders Program, and assistant professor at the Yale Child Study Center

Publishers Note

This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering psychological, financial, legal, or other professional services. If expert assistance or counseling is needed, the services of a competent professional should be sought.

Distributed in Canada by Raincoast Books

Copyright 2017 by Bridget Flynn Walker

New Harbinger Publications, Inc.

5674 Shattuck Avenue

Oakland, CA 94609

www.newharbinger.com

Cover design by Amy Shoup

Acquired by Camille Hayes

Edited by Jennifer Eastman

All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data on file

Twenty years ago, my wife and I arrived home from the hospital with our newborn daughter, Madeleine. I turned off the car, and my wife and I sat for a few moments staring in wide-eyed awe at tiny and beautiful Madeleine asleep in her car seat.

I looked at my wife and, with a nervous smile, asked, By the way, did they give you the operators manual for the baby?

My wife looked at me with a nervousyet less nervoussmile, No, I thought they gave the manual to you. This did not reassure me.

When I think of that moment, I still think it was a bit crazy, or at least unwise, for the nurse to send us home with a newborn infant. I assume they believed we would figure the parenting thing out, as so many other parents have done, but still, it is unsettling when you think about it, right? Of course, most parents do figure it out, with the support of friends and family members, but what parent has not longed for an operators manual to guide them at a critical moment in child rearing, particularly at those moments when their child is suffering?

Over 25 percent of children and adolescents suffer with an anxiety disorder, making anxiety disorders the number one mental health issue for youth. Behavioral science tells us that parents play a key role in assisting a child to recover from anxiety disorders and other mental health problems, and it makes intuitive sense too. Parents are in a better position to observe, support, and intervene with their anxious child than any mental health professional. The anxious moments that occur in the lives of most children seldom occur in the therapists office. They occur in the world in which the child liveshome, school, soccer field, playdatesand, typically, the parents live there too.

So where is the operators manual for parents who wish to help their child recover from an anxiety disorder? There are many booksor operators manuals, if you willon the topic of assisting overanxious children, but perhaps few are as clear and as thoughtful as this one. This book covers the basics of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), the psychological treatment of choice for overanxious youth, and the author, Dr. Bridget Flynn Walker, is an expert in this approach.

This book will guide you and your child through the process of recovering from an anxiety disorder. Like any operators manual, this book covers the basics, such as educating you and your child about anxiety and anxiety disorders, identifying the triggers of your childs anxious response, setting the stage for exposure, and assisting your child in completing and benefiting from these important and essential exposures. Furthermore, although the research on pediatric anxiety disorders and their treatment is extensive and often rather dense for many parents, this book takes some of the most important topics and explains them in simple and straightforward language. Every operators manual includes a troubleshooting section, and several chapters in this book include one too. In those sections, you will learn strategies to overcome the obstacles that typically arise when helping children face the things that frighten them.