It's so interesting to see all the differing opinions. DS5 has gotten more anxious as each year has passed and it really affects his life now. We hope it's a phase. And we are lucky he's still so young in that much of the time it's easy for us to see that it's his personal drama that needs to be managed rather than that the family should make some major change. If he were my DH instead of a 5 year old of course if he said he couldn't manage a long trip then we wouldn't go. Where is the magic cutoff age or level of anxiety that makes it valid to change plans?
In our family we vary in how we handle each thing that comes up with DS depending on how we as adults perceive the true level of threat and what DS thinks may help. We try not to get into the stats with DS but sometimes we do. Sometimes we laugh at him outright. Sometimes we drop everything and offer a shoulder to cry on. But we pretty much always go wherever we said we were going, to let DS dictate the schedule would be a really slippery slope. Sometimes though I do let him cut the day short, when it's been a rough day for him I'll cancel errands etc and let him get home, and here and there I let him stay home if he wants. DH mildly disapproves.
For DS, despite him thinking it is this or that that is anxiety provoking, it's more that some of the time he's anxious, and when he's anxious he's prone to interpreting normal life events to be upsetting. He then latches onto those particular things and the next time his internal state is anxious he revisits those things to think about. Sometimes he's anxious and hasn't got anything good to fixate on and I'll hear him go through several different worries one after another.
Our ability to manage him has improved a lot over the last 6 months. For us a big help was realizing that the moment we say anything at all in response we are making it feel important to him, whether it's us cracking and telling him in a tense voice to be quiet about it, or gently listening to his feelings in an effort to make him feel he's being understood. It makes it something. As master of none said sometimes the act of talking about a fear gives it more power, for DS that seems to be true. For DS even the act of us getting emotional telling him to knock it off can draw too much attention to it and make it so he feels compelled to talk about it. Whereas if I'd said nothing he might have moved on to something else. So the only thing we've found for his repeat chronic worries that reliably works is total silence on our part.
There's the repeat chronic worries and then there's times when it's obvious he's just riddled with anxiety, and in the latter times I try to give him attention for his inner discomfort without discussing any particular item he's mentioned. Like, "you look like you could use a hug".
I sort of feel like my job is not to end his anxiety because he's got to learn to live with it, but to help him avoid fixating on any particular OCD item that would really interfere with life. So basically being really supportive in terms of understanding that he's anxious, but not giving him any attention or latitude when he worries specifically about germs, modes of travel, etc.
We wrote down a list of house rules and one of them we invented (in the being polite and respectful of others category) is that people get to express their feelings twice and then if no one else wants to talk about it the issue needs to be dropped for the moment. Us adults try to remember to ask him later or the next day if he wants to talk about X that he was upset about earlier, bring it back up once he's well fed and exercised and all that. We don't always remind DS of the rule but when he has said a couple times in a row "are you sure this apple doesn't have chemicals on it?" we remind him of the two times rule and ask him to move on to something else. If he doesn't he gets a time out.
By the way, DS is eating the apple with socks over his hands because of some historical apple anxiety 2 years ago that was miraculously solved with hand socks. We let him indulge in small things as that makes him feel loved and accomodated. He doesn't eat apples in public because he really likes to wear the socks and doesn't have access to socks out in public. LOL. I'm still hopeful after 2 years that it's a phase.
DS has just about daily meltdowns. I worry (yes there's the genetics) that he may need some accomodations in school next year for being so emotional. For example this week with anxiety over a fun activity coming to a close, he melted down and cried the last 20 minutes of it because it was about to end, thereby missing that last 20 min. So for example I can see him needing unlimited time on tests, lest he begin worrying about the test ending the moment it starts and thus not being able to complete it.
Since DH and I have gotten tough about employing silence in managing DSs drama he and I have unexpectedly bonded over it. It's really hard to not engage sometimes. When we start feeling like we are about to crack and engage in some way with DS's anxiety we reach a hand out and the other takes it...
Anyways that's our take on our particular DS, ended up sort of repetitive but that's some insight to DS's genetics, LOL.
I can imagine it gets much harder with a 9 year old because they are now able to convincingly discuss subjects like an adult but can still have the irrational amorphous fears of a small child.
