Growing Up Brave: Expert Strategies for Helping Your Child Overcome Fear, Stress, and Anxiety

by Donna B. Pincus

When our children are born, we do everything we can to make sure they have love, food, clothing, and shelter. We read to them, play with them, and comfort them when they cry. But despite all this, one in five children today suffers from a diagnosed anxiety disorder, and countless others suffer from anxiety that interferes with critical social, academic, and physical development.

Dr. Donna Pincus, nationally recognized childhood anxiety expert, is here to help. In Growing Up Brave, Dr. Pincus helps parents identify and understand anxiety in their children, outlines effective and convenient parenting techniques for reducing anxiety, and shows parents how to promote bravery for long-term confidence. Perhaps your young child has trouble sleeping or separation anxiety, or your teen suffers from social anxiety or panic attacks--whatever the issue, Growing Up Brave can help.

Using methods based on cognitive behavioral therapy, you will learn to identify your child's fear and anxiety on the spectrum from normal and predictable to what might be cause for concern, to promote a secure attachment with your child in only five minutes a day, tools to foster coping skills in the face of anxiety-producing situations, strategies for reinforcing problem-solving behavior, adaptive parenting styles, and much more. Dr. Pincus includes stories from her practice of children--from preschoolers to teens--who have overcome their fear and anxiety through her step-by-step approach, as well as information on therapy and medication.

Whether your child has been diagnosed with an anxiety disorder or simply needs help navigating this increasingly stressful world, Growing Up Brave provides an essential toolkit for instilling happiness and confidence for childhood and beyond.

Genres: Parenting, Nonfiction, Psychology, Mental Health, Education, Self Help, Medical

Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2012

Reviews

[Mary · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you are looking for help dealing with an anxious child, this practical and insightful book is a great resource. The book is filled with stories from Dr. Pincus' therapy practice, and while some of the stories were more relevant than others, her advice made me feel empowered to help my child with her anxiety. There is certainly no shortage of books about parenting, but this book has been especially helpful. Some of the strategies I plan to employ in my household are the Five-Minutes-a-Day-Time, interrupting the cycle of anxiety, and the relaxation techniques. One idea that was particularly powerful was allowing the child to feel anxious feelings and then encouraging them to wait until those feelings fade rather than avoiding them. Upon reading this book, I have a better understanding of how my child's mind works and how I can intervene in a productive way.

[Laney · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hugely informative and helpful.

[Wright · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars

Much of the book referenced cases of anxiety more severe and in younger children than my 11 year old. Still though - a lot of helpful general info and techniques to improve feelings and behaviors. A list in the book summarized a lot of what I found helpful:


"The Dos and Don'ts of Helping Your Child Get Brave

A few general reminders:

• DON’T give extra positive attention to your child when she's complaining or distressed about separating from you. It's okay to be caring and reflect her feelings; tell her you understand how hard it is to try to do this on her own, and you're going to be very proud of her for trying.

• DO save the extra praise for after she's begun to approach the new situation, even for taking a small step toward the larger goal. Say, "You've done a great job. I'm very proud of the way you try new things even when it's hard.

• DON'T pull your child out of tough situations because you want to avoid "making a scene."

• DO help her engage in developmentally appropriate behaviors and tell her you're confident that the can do this selected activity.

• DON’T try to make all the choices for your child.

• DO let her make small decisions on her own. Just as you practiced in CDI, it's okay to let children lead. This is a useful rule to remember when you and they are talking over a Bravery Ladder. What would she like to work on first? Going on a playdate, for example, or to a friend's birthday party?

• DON’T worry too much if your child is slow to start. Learning to be brave takes time.

• DO encourage without nagging. Let her know that it will get easier each time she tries something new. Let her hear you brag about her to grandma or a good friend. She realizes how proud she has made you."

[Kjersti · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a fascinating book. It talked about all degrees of anxiety in kids. Only about a quarter of the book was devoted to toddler issues but I read most of the rest because it was so interesting.

From a parenting book perspective I did appreciate that the author is a working mother. That, and the fact that she runs a center for anxious kids and their families led to some very practical advice. I also appreciated that she is a respected doctor in her field, some parenting books are written by people who you can only guess at why they are even writing a book or where they got their sources.

Would like to revisit the book when my kids are older.

[Cassie | Cassie’s Next Chapter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Instead of worrying about a setback, point out..."You just had a hard day. Everyone has them. It's perfectly normal. We're going to start again tomorrow. I know you can do it."

This book is an essential resource for parents and professionals wanting to understand and reduce childhood anxiety. Dr. Pincus does a wonderful job breaking down the issues into laymen's terms for understanding the underlying causes behind some basic childhood fears and anxieties. She also lays out some suggested methods to help combat these issues using Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) to actively change the thought processes behind the anxious feelings and actions.

The connections and examples are clear, and the suggested CBT methods seem easy to implement. There are plenty of activities to try at home between parent and child to work through anxiety to keep it at a functioning level. Dr. Pincus points out that avoidance of the stressor only exacerbates its existence - the goal is to accept that some situations create fear and stress, and the resulting feelings in our bodies are sensations with which we can live. The goal is to change our thinking around them to less of a flight behavior and more of "I feel anxiety, and I can do this anyway."

I would have welcomed this knowledge for myself as a child! I'll look forward to updating this review with feedback about the effectiveness of her methods.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the book that every parent wishes their child came with at birth. It is an outstanding, well-written guide that is based on state-of-the-art research (not just on opinion). The book teaches parents practical, easy to implement skills for helping children learn healthy ways to manage anxiety and stress. I highly recommend it!! It is an essential guide for anxiety prevention and treatment that belongs on every parent’s’ bookshelf.

[Coffeebelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm in the middle of the introduction and I am already recommending this book to other people. A 5-star first impression!

**After finishing the book, I can honestly say that this book is a must-read for all parents and teachers. I envy the children who will grow up understanding that anxiety is just as valid is anger and shame, happiness and pride.

[Lesley · Rating 4 out of 5]

An good, easy to read book for parents to help children who sometimes have anxious times and how to support them the correct way.

[Ethan Wells · Rating 2 out of 5]

Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard. A throw of the dice will never abolish chance. Such is the title of a poem by Stéphane Mallarmé that Donna Pincus has almost certainly never read. Yet it is one that imposes itself throughout her book, beginning with the book’s title. Whatever else “strategies” might entail, they never occur simply in the singular (there is never only one strategy; the very fact that one needs a strategy in the first place implies that there is more than one possible strategy to choose from, as is clear enough if one recalls that the word “strategy” harkens from a military idiom. The military strategist, after all, must always try to account in advance for the strategy of his opponent.) and they always imply an element of chance - the possibility that they might not bear fruit. And while Pincus would no doubt be the first to admit that the strategies she proposes for overcoming fear, stress, and especially anxiety, might not work all the time or for all kids, this possibility nonetheless haunts her book in ways that she is unwilling, or unable, to confront - with, it turns out, far-reaching consequences. How so?

From the book’s very first pages, Pincus is rather … anxious … to demonstrate her bona fides and to establish herself as the expert she purports to be on, among other things, anxiety. She comes across as supremely confident as she recounts, in the book’s opening paragraph, how 700 people attended a talk she gave, how “highly respected” (5) is the center she runs, and how many children she has successfully helped. The case-histories she recounts throughout the book are, without exception to the best of my recollection, stories of success, and not failure - even though the latter might have proven more instructive. This confidence seems to overflow itself, taking on at times a proselytizing aspect more consistent with a religious discourse than a scientific one: “I am happy to present in this book,” she writes, “the good news on how we can approach childhood anxiety” (6). But what makes this excessive confidence so problematic is that the good news that she would share is the gospel of … self-confidence. “When I talk about a child growing up brave,” she writes, “I mean one who over time develops a sense of self-efficacy. The psychologist Albert Bandura (...) writes: ‘People with high assurance in their capabilities approach difficult tasks as challenges to be mastered rather than as threats to be avoided” (12-13). “In gaining self-confidence,” she continues on the next page, “... children realize their emotions and sensitivities don’t have to derail them from activities that may be a required part of growing up or may just be a lot of fun” (14). But does Pincus’ own confidence risk derailing her project by outrunning what would warrant it?

If Pincus is over-confident about the benefits of teaching kids how to be self-confident, two implications follow pretty quickly: first, it implies that placing one’s bets on the epistemological reliability of her discourse is something of a gamble. The person who is over-confident, after all, is liable to promise more than she can deliver. Put otherwise, it means that the confusion of scientific and religious idioms in her book is no accident but instead has a necessity to it, with the consequence that her discourse would not simply - or, even ultimately - be a scientific one. It would instead be a question of a faith, of a confidence (from the Latin fides, “faith”) that she both exemplifies and demands, without, however, it ever being fully earned. It is this that generates in her text teleological tendencies that, as teleological, can never be empirically grounded. Whence, for example, her claim that being afraid of certain things is “how we’re supposed to be” (16, my emphasis). Second, if it is by means of confidence that one combats anxiety, Pincus’ own excessive self-confidence would suggest that at stake in her book is not just how to teach kids to manage their anxiety; it is also a question of how she manages her own anxiety, by confronting it, for example, again and again, in the faces of her patients. She is, in short, implicated in her own discourse in a way that appears to entirely escape her awareness. One might suspect, moreover, that it is the very persistance of an anxiety that remains to be faced that drives her to share the “good news” in a quasi-religious manner, precisely in order to reinforce her own flagging self-confidence by creating congregations of the faithful able to proselytize in turn.

Where, then, does Pincus’ over-confidence give itself to be read? Following a long philosophical tradition with which she appears unfamiliar, Pincus defines anxiety in terms of fear: it is “excessive fearfulness” (14). In its excessiveness, anxiety is inherently “future-oriented” (14), as Pincus correctly notes, precisely because it has no simple object in the world. The task then, as she sees it, is to rein in this excessiveness by tethering anxiety to the here and now. Whence her insistence that one must face one’s fears (and that's the right word to use: as soon as one’s anxieties can be faced in the world, they’re no longer excessive and thus no longer anxieties but just plain fears). Ok. That the future-orientedness of anxiety does not give Pincus pause, that she doesn’t stop to wonder whether quieting our anxieties might come not just at a price, but precisely at the price of the future - a future that is legitimately anxiety-provoking because it marks, for each of us, the end of the world, i.e. that which is not continuous with what we take to be our own present realities, needs to be remarked, especially at a time when we “face” a global catastrophe in the form of climate change, one that underscores, more and more emphatically with each passing moment, that the world that is coming is not going to be the world that we have known. One might wonder how actually to tether anxiety born of that world to this one, since it is precisely their fundamental incompatibility that generates it in the first place.

One doesn’t need, however, to invoke the specter of climate change to see how Pincus’ own emphasis on a certain realism is ultimately an escape from it. Again and again, she wants to tame anxiety by encouraging the child to be more “realistic.” What one hopes to engender in one’s child, she claims in the Introduction, is “the conviction that he can manage whatever comes his way. (...) Part of any parent’s job,” she continues, “is to encourage a child to feel there’s nowhere he can���t go - within the context, of course, of teaching what’s truly safe or not appropriate. It’s not safe to go off with strangers, but it is safe to walk into a kindergarten classroom even though mom won’t be staying with you and you don’t know the other kids” (13). Yet the conviction that one can manage whatever comes one’s way, that one can identify what’s “truly safe,” that a kindergarten kid has nothing to fear about going to school, that all of this might be a sheer fiction is underscored by the fact that Pincus’ book came out in August 2012, less than four months before a gunman massacred twenty 6 and 7 year olds, along with six adults, at Sandy Hook Elementary School. The massacre at Sandy Hook was never likely to happen. But it was always possible that something like Sandy Hook could happen. Anxiety is an attunement, as it were, to what is always possible, regardless of whether it in fact takes place. To calm your kid’s anxiety about kindergarten by telling him that nothing bad will happen to him because it is unlikely to is not realism; it’s a numbers game, one, moreover, whose odds defy any rigorous calculation. And while such reassurance may well “work,” it is always possible that it will turn out to have been a fiction - and a cruel one at that.

Something similar might be said of Pincus’ strategies in general. They may well work, and may well be worth pursuing - but they will also always involve a roll of the dice, potentially for the highest of stakes. And if anxiety is indeed an “attunement” to the always-possible, rolling the dice will never succeed in abolishing what makes the roll necessary in the first place: the way what we call the actual is over-determined from the get-go by a potentiality ("fiction," if you want) that interrupts it at every point.

[Jen (thatmamabooknook) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Written by Dr. Donna B. Pincus from BU CARD (a big name in the anxiety world, especially in Massachusetts) I really appreciated the plethora of strategies, examples, and advice she provided in this book. I did feel like the book was maybe slightly less applicable to younger kids (much more helpful if they know how to read and write and have a little more abstract thinking), but at the same time I am glad that I read this while my kids are young, so I know I can refer back to it in a few years if needed. Still there was some good takeaways from the book that can be applied across the age groups. My favorite was probably the Bravery Ladder--the book included lots of examples too. Overall, would definitely recommend this book to other caregivers that have children (elementary school and up) with an anxiety disorder or even just a tendency to more anxious thinking.

[Becky Hillary · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book has practical tools for helping children age toddler through teenager to work on bravery and anxiety. There are some mindful exercises and the description of the bravery ladder struck me as a useful tool for myself as an adult. Using the bravery ladder you look at your triggers- something causing you worry, anxiety or fear and come up with step by step challenges where you expand your comfort zone one rung of the ladder at a time. This type of work works well for me as an adult. A book like this was hard to rate, it had practical information and I rated it as compared to books in its genre.

[Breana · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a mother of a young child with an anxiety disorder, I found this book very helpful. The content in this book is geared towards a wide age-range of children. This book does a great job of covering the content it intends, helping parents identify and understand anxiety in their children. The book also shares techniques for parents to use for helping their children.

[Kylie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Super helpful, high-level look at anxiety in children. The author does a great job of making intense concepts accessible to the lay parent trying to understand. She also provides actionable advice and a variety of tactics to try, which was great. I’d definitely recommend this to anyone worried about an anxious kid.

[Eric · Rating 1 out of 5]

I personally did not find this book helpful, it could be because my daughter is 13 and never has anxiety. We are open to talk and she handles her anxiety how I would imagine any 13 years old would handle it, by not making a big deal out of it and living her life.
I stopped reading halfway through the book because it did not apply to me and my family.

[Catherine Caldwell-Harris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Here is a book for kids with anxieties, including the garden variety. It also has advice for kids who have anxieties that are the precursors to OCD, social phobia, generalized anxiety and panic. It also has a chapter on helping kids fall asleep that would be useful for almost any parent of young children.

[Jen Bury · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wish I had this book when my kids were younger! Not only are there great explanations and examples, but this book actually teaches strategies and applications!
However, I am glad to have it now as there are also teen strategies! It’s never too late!

I highly recommend this to all parents, grandparents, teachers, etc!

[Kristin Emmons · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book contained a lot of great descriptions of how anxiety manifests itself in children and teens as well as some great suggestions of what to try in order to help such a child or teen. I'm looking forward to trying them and seeing if they help.

[Angie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book contains helpful, practical, and simple ideas and strategies to ease children's anxieties while boosting their confidence and feelings of security. Lots of helpful ideas that are useful for any kid, not just those who suffer from anxiety.

[Stephanie Williams · Rating 3 out of 5]

I got some good cognitive behavior therapy ideas for dealing with my son's anxiety.

I do have an issue with the author taking food allergies lightly. She offers terrible advice to a patient with food allergies, the author needs to be educated on how food allergies can be life threatening.

[Katie]

Real life advice I put to work on a daily basis. We've seen great progress. I don't know if it was thanks to the strategies or just maturation, but I felt better having a script to follow/knowing how to best react myself during times of "panic".

[Becca · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love her clear explanations of anxiety and how to deal with it. I am using her strategies and teaching my kids and feeling a lot more hopeful about their struggles with fear and anxiety. I would recommend this.

[Tami DuBow`` · Rating 3 out of 5]

I probably would’ve given this book more stars if I’d read it earlier in my kids’ lives or hadn’t already been doing counseling. It didn’t give me much new info, but a few ideas.

[Cara · Rating 3 out of 5]

There were some good visualization tips and other great parenting ideas in this book.

[Meg · Rating 4 out of 5]

Many practical strategies for helping support children with anxiety.

[Genna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Insightful book with some good parenting tips and suggestions.

[Lucy Marincel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic read

Very helpful in a thinking about how to be the best parent I can. Going to buy my own copy to keep for reference.

[Caroline Zito · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some good strategies but nothing life changing.

[Sarah Davis · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very informative read, very helpful

[Rolf · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent, approachable, researched-based collection of both insights and practices for parents to try with anxious children. Very, very helpful for our anxious littles.

[Amanda Davis · Rating 4 out of 5]

This helped me so much with using the techniques for my anxious 6 year old and really being able to understand things from his side.