by Gretchen on July 1, 2010
No one wishes anxiety and fear on a child, but dealing with anxiety appropriately is necessary to live a successful life. Too often, we see people suffering as adults because they never learned how to handle anxiety as a child. That’s why appropriate child anxiety treatment is crucial.
Young people frequently can’t control their emotions and frequently will act out their emotions.Every child reacts differently. When anxiety strikes, a child may become aggressive. Or they may become depressed.
As adults, we all have to manage with some degree of anxiety. Learning to manage it successfully as part of growing up. If you think your child has behavior triggered by anxiety, part of your job as a parent is to coach them on how they can handle anxiety appropriately without acting out or suppressing their emotions. Right now I want to give you an idea that will help you coach your children, especially young children.
Young children don’t think abstractly. The abstract concept of being “nervous” or “anxious” doesn’t have much meaning for them. However, all children are experts at recognizing facial expressions. Because of this, you can use pictures in a book or magazine to help young children become more expert at dealing with emotions.
For example, you could look at a picture of a happy child and ask questions such as “What do you think that boy feels like?”, “Why do you think he feels that way?” “What do you think he’s thinking?.” You can also give your own answers to these questions and have fun making up stories with your child.
Next, you can look at pictures of children that appear anxious and ask questions about them. It’s possible that your child will answer questions about the anxious child in the picture in a way that reveals some things that are troubling them. Even if they don’t, you can ask a follow up question about what might help the child or how they could deal with their the problem causing the fear. After your child answers, or if they don’t, you could tell them some ways of acting that you think might be helpful. Perhaps you could say something like “Well if I was that boy and I was worried about kids picking on me at school, I think I’d remind myself that no one has the right to pick on someone else and that their behavior says more about them than me. I also think I’d talk to Mom and Dad about it.”
Part of what you want to do with this exercise is both the children realize that it’s normal to experience a range of emotions in life and that there are helpful ways of dealing with them available to them.
You can find a lot of other ideas about helping kids deal with anxiety at Childhood Anxiety Disorder Help, which is a site dedicated to helping parents help their kids. You may also want to look at an excellent program called the Anxiety Free Child. With the help of their program, you can coach your child on how to reclaim their joy.
by Gretchen on July 1, 2010
The average age of a child’s exposure to internet porn is about 9 years of age and about 90% of children aged 8-16 have already been exposed to porn by that age. There are 4.2 million porn sites online and the number grows by 2,500 new porn sites per day. 25 million Americans surf porn sites 1-10 hours a week and another 4 millions Americans surf porn in excess of 11 hours a week. Last week, about 57% men at an event at Promise Keepers were found out to have been surfing a porn site before it. Most church assemblies are facing the dilemma of pornography according to many pastors. 33% of Pastors have admitted to viewing a porn site and 18% of these have viewed it more than once a week. For every 10 men in church, 5 are struggling with pornography. That’s a high 50%. 20% of the church going women are facing the same issue. Gone are the days of thinking that your family is safe online.
Pornographers have become invasive. They are inventing ways to get content onto your child’s screen. Their content has saturated the medium that our children are required by law to use in order to graduate. The internet can be an extensive form of emotional child abuse, where children are asked to do something, thus making them emotionally unstable and reluctant to face the world as they grow older. Children don’t need to gosearching for pornpgraphic material any more because porn is hunting them down. Porn on the internet is like having a drug dealer standing outside your 9-year-old’s elementary school yard as he/she gets out of school. That dealer simply hands a free drug sample to each child as they walk by, knowing that some will try it and a few will become addicted to it, increasing its customer-base and its profits. Pornographers are playing the same numbers game. If they put enough content out there, chances are, your child will get exposed and maybe, they’ll be the one who become addicted to it. Surviving child abuse is not an easy task and would take a long period of time to achieve.
Social welfare has determined some child abuse information and scientists have determined that it takes just a few imperceptible moments for a porn image to go from your child’s eyes to his/her long-term memory where it’s hard-wired chemically by the brain. That image can never be erased. A developing child can’t process the image in their cognitive or recent part of the brain yet and because of this, the brain makes an instinctual fight-or-flight chemical response. If children are exposed to such malicious images, they will not grow to live from a healthy God-centered perspective, instead they will fall into the blasphemy of sin and unhealthy living.
In order to protect your child online, move your computer to a location in the house where it is easy to keep an eye on everyone and be keen in observing child signs, which may show that something is not quite right, especially when they are in front of the computer. You also need to install some type of monitoring software on all computers the kids use or some parental control software. Finally, the best thing to do is to talk with your children once in a while for this will make them loved and comfortable with your presence.
These easy tips can also make your kids safer online than they are today.
