Probably depends on the kid; we go the other way and look hard at the worst-case scenario and how likely that is and how we'd respond. DS is not a pessimist, but his anxiety tends to go toward worst-case, and he WILL NOT BELIEVE us if we give him a rosier picture. If we go there with him, though, and say, OK, if the house was engulfed in fire, you'd go out that way and meet us at the neighbor's, he actually feels better. Weird, but works for us.
DeeDee
My son and I also deal with anxiety this way, but when the weird statistically unlikely things started happening more frequently to my family I had a lot more anxiety because I realized we could not prepare for everything. My son will have to have a six-hour surgery and stay in the hospital for nearly a week and I can't even think about worst case scenarios, but he has been playing some kind of online surgery game and I think this might be his way of desensitizing himself. I think he feels that it works better for him than seeing another doctor about his medical related anxiety.
My son and I homeschool and were working on probability and statistics when we found out that he had something that was about 1 in 5000 chance of having. I started thinking about how unlikely it is for someone to go in for routine surgery perfectly normal and come out with severe brain damage but it happened to my mother. It felt like only bad things were happening to us and we had no control, but my son said that it was statistically unlikely that we would be born and that was a good thing. He told me once that I was using gambler's fallacy or reverse gambler's fallacy or something like that when I was ready to give up trying to do something that I wanted to do because I was having a lot of bad luck and just expected it to continue.
I almost didn't tell him about a chance to be an extra on a film a few days ago, something he had wanted to do but couldn't because he wore the brace for several years. I had anxiety knowing that he would have to be there for hours, might get a migraine, would not be able to eat lunch until they finished the scene, would probably get back pain if he couldn't move and stretch like he is able to do at home, etc. I thought about what he said and decided we would just try it. He loved it. He was selected to do a classroom scene, playing a high school senior even though he is only 14. He was younger than several of the boys who were not selected, but he looks and acts like a kid several years older and his friends were always several years older. He had so much fun and he learned more about movie acting. He wants to do more things like this. He did musical theater for years, but he would like to do more film acting or voice acting. It gives him more of a reason to risk the surgery to fix his back which will get worse if he doesn't have the surgery. He knows the risks but will not let anxiety or pain stop him from doing what he wants to do.
