Re: this article
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-coddling-of-the-american-mind/399356/I have an 8yo 2E kid who is on the anxious side. If a kid falls on the playground, she covers her ears and kind of freaks out. She gets very anxious about doing things wrong. She also freaks out when bad things happen in novels or movies. When she was 4, she had trouble with TV shows (like Caillou) where bad things happened to people (like skinning a knee). She also worries a lot. Our solution was to get rid of the TV. As a result, we've sheltered her from current events.
BUT she's a history kid, loves everything history, knows a lot about world history, and has never really had a problem with bad things happening in the past. She can sensibly self sensor when she runs across things she can't handle. She recently stopped reading a book on Edgar Allen Poe, for example, and put it in her shelf for when she is older. BUT she's reading about the ways people died in the Dust Bowl and that is working out fine.
She is starting to read the news on the internet, so we are starting to try to bring current events (i.e., Syria, etc.) to her gently because it is not going to stay gentle to her for long.
So when I read this Atlantic article and how it relates to anxiousness, I wonder how to handle this stage in a gentle enough way without coddling so much that it messes her up.
In the last two days I have noticed several young children being very articulate about what makes them uncomfortable with the expectation that parents won't expect them to leave their comfort zones, and I'm wondering that our gentleness around their anxieties actually makes them worse.
Any thoughts?
