I thought I'd ask, since I know several of you on here have probably gone through this. DS8 has some anxiety issues, as well as a mood disorder. The mood disorder is pretty well under control now thanks to meds (yay proper meds!), the anxiety is the same as ever though. It doesn't manifest in any big way, so we aren't treating it right now (other than in counseling if something comes up), but he does typical anxiety things like chew his fingernails, skip meals, have trouble sleeping, etc. (The food and sleep problems don't happen very often.)

How do you handle it when a kid like this brings up some sort of major world problem/issue? DS started asking about gas/oil the other day. He's very concerned that we are digging oil out of the ground and burning it all up in our cars, and then we are going to run out, and then what will we all do?

I talked with him for a bit about electric cars and the stuff that's being worked on, and I think that pacified him. He's a fairly quiet kid a lot of the time, and I'm not sure he's not still worried about it.

ETA: Can I just say I love having a place where I can talk about the fact my child is worried about peak oil with people who actually understand?

The same thing we did before we used gas and oil.

You know. Most of recorded history. The part with horses instead of cars.

The real question is how much energy can be obtained through standard renewable resources, such as solar, geothermal, tidal, etc.

It's really "peak cheap energy vs. human labor" moreso that "peak oil". I don't know a thing about nuclear with respect to this discussion, so I've never been able to lock down any projections with respect to this.

Oh boy, do we ever deal with this. In fact, we avoid exposing DD to news, generally, which I realize is not going to be possible forever.

To some extent, information can help. However, in some cases we find that promisng DD she does not need to worry about X thing is necessary. I don't do this if I can't really promise it, but I have promised that, for instance, our house is not going to be bombed.

We have the same issue, here. No news in the house, too. It is nice to know we aren't alone.

When my older boy was 7 (I think that is right), I talked to him about the earthquake in Haiti, since it was on the news alot. Then the teacher had a special conference with us b/c he was expressing dark thoughts about how what if the school collapsed on everyone and they all died?
I don't do that anymore. I think many gifted children are very emotionally sensitive, and I just will wait until they are older to bring up mature topics like that.

And oh those commercials for organizations like Save the Children and World Wildlife Fund! "Mommy - did you hear that? WE HAVE TO HELP THEM!" Just the other day a man approached us on the street asking for money to catch a train home - "Mommy he must really be desperate - WE HAVE TO HELP HIM!"

I love that she is a generous, caring, thoughtful soul. However it will also be so easy for people to take advantage of her. It's a really hard line to walk.

With the man on street I explained that if we were at the train station and he said he needed money for his train ticket home I would happily go to the ticket window and help him buy his ticket but there are people who make up stories and take advantage of other people so we can't just hand someone money on the street. She seemed shocked that people would lie about needing help but accepted the explanation.

With larger world issues we look for tangible ways that she can feel like she is making a difference. i.e. over the past 2 years she has raised approximately $1200 for Relay for Life with a lemonade stand. She also brings dog/cat food, toiletries, toys, etc for every collection box at school. I think as long as she feels like she is doing something it all seems less overwhelming.

Smart kids with anxiety really keep us on our toes don't they?

DS is *definitely* not allowed to watch the news, nor does he watch live tv (pre-recorded stuff off the DVR, or things my husband has downloaded for him). I am pretty sure he learned about oil at school. This isn't the first time they've introduced topics at school that have sent DS's brain into overdrive (solar flares!? deforestation!? etc).

Sadly, the 'It's going to be fine, don't worry about it' answer rarely, if ever, seems to satisfy him.

We do try to do charity work and donations, to show him how you can actually help, but some things, like oil, just seem to be too abstract to do much about. (Abstract's not really the right word there, but it's Friday...)

Epoh - a couple of weeks ago we were at the Science Center and saw their film about ways to reduce your carbon footprint. Could something like this help your ds? I mean give him a tangible way to make a difference about even such a big issue? For example DD made me immediately unplug our electric can opener when we got home. Maybe he could figure out ways for you to drive X fewer miles each week, what would happen if you changed the temperature in your home by X degrees, calculate the savings if you dried X loads of laundry outside instead of in a clothes dryer, etc.

If he is going to think (or even fixate) about this problem maybe you can change his thought process so he looks at ways to help rather than just focus on the scary part. Or maybe take a page from JonLaw's post and have the family spend a day or a weekend roughing it - see what you would in fact do if you really had to? I can totally understand that the "don't worry" approach won't work - with mine that would just send her into overdrive. If I am not going to take it seriously then she will have to worry twice as much to make up for it.

Just a few ideas. Not sure if they help but thought I would throw them out there. Good luck!

I like the carbon footprint reduction idea. That will probably work for Wolf when it comes up. We also try to avoid a lot of the "adult" news issues with him.

He found out about the Mayan Doomsday madness and freaks out, like literally freaks out, whenever anyone mentioned anything at all about it. What we've done is explain that there are some things that adults like to discuss even though they aren't necessarily a real threat, just because adults like to think about possibilities. We tell him when a topic is that type of topic (we put politics in this category). It seems to help. There are things we can't do that with, things that are actual threats, but so far he hasn't fixated on any of those.

We've addressed this a couple times (most notably when my youngest were three, and the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were attacked).
One of the things that I've pointed out from time to time, because we have a strong family tradition of public service, is that part of being smarter than the average bear means that potentially these children have more power to make positive change as adults. To use one's powers for good and not evil, as it were. That sense of "I can help fix things" is occasionally a weighty responsibility, but far more often a feeling that empowers and reassures, IME.

Wyldkat -

My parents recently returned from a trip where they visited the Mayan ruins. They said that the tourguide said there is no issue with their calendar, they simply reset it every so many years.
They have absolutely no fear of the world ending and think it is amusing that others believe that (but it is really good for their tourism).

I hope that helps your son!

I'm pretty sure that's outside the realm of science.

ITA with that last comment. Knowledge is power, especially for those who are as relentlessly concrete and logical as some of our kids.
Likewise, I think it is most comforting to believe that the Universe works much like one's own brain-- be those workings spiritual and with a tendency toward believing in Mystery, or not. FWIW, my daughter arrived at her conclusions toward atheism at eight, around the time of her First Communion, when she announced: "Well, because no one bothers if I sin except you, Mom, and I KNOW you aren't God."
Hard to argue that one.

As above, so below. As within, so without.

Let's hear it for analogy!

That's not quite true. The enforcers care. Deeply care.

"Wilby is an enforcer—compelled to punish wrongdoers and stamp out injustice even when it means making himself a target. Self-assertive, with a deep sense of right and wrong, and with occasional authoritarian tendencies, enforcers do whatever they feel is necessary to keep their community in order—no matter the personal cost. While most of us bite our tongues when we see someone cheated or treated unfairly, enforcers cannot be stifled."

Psychology Today - Field Guide to the Enforcer

The enforcers in our community care about what everyone else is doing. They care so much that people in my small town community in the Bible belt are dropping out of the one and only homeschool group in our area because the leadership recently voted to remove one of the homeschool families from the group. This family did something they didn't agree with, something the leadership felt was sinful. They cited this as the reason why they had to do it:

Dealing With Sin in the Church

15 “If your brother or sister[a] sins,[b] go and point out their fault, just between the two of you. If they listen to you, you have won them over. 16 But if they will not listen, take one or two others along, so that ‘every matter may be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses.’[c] 17 If they still refuse to listen, tell it to the church; and if they refuse to listen even to the church, treat them as you would a pagan or a tax collector.

So if you do something they don't like, you are shunned. Other people are starting to voluntarily remove themselves from the roles of the homeschool group because they don't agree with what is happening.

Although we didn't participate in the homeschool co-op this year (because of my son's difficulties with his brace) we are still members of the group. My son had some anxiety last year because he felt like they watched everything we said and did. He became very quiet. He learned to bite his tongue. Not only did he have to deal with anxiety and pain but also social isolation.

We have enforcers in our family. We feel them looking down on us for things like not going to church with the rest of the family. It doesn't matter that my son has trouble getting up early enough to go to church because he has so much trouble sleeping and it is uncomfortable for him to sit in the brace. I had trouble going there after the preacher talked about anxiety being sinful. At that time my mother had extreme anxiety after complications of surgery left her with severe brain damage and she was literally pulling her hair out. It became unbearable after I heard people at church talking about young people who dress "inappropriately" by wearing jeans instead of slacks to church and I felt really sad when I heard about the teenager who visited the church alone but didn't remove his hat so an older church member chastised him for that. He never came back. Instead of support these people tell you that you are causing your pain by being sinful in some way.

We tried a different church. I had trouble getting my son to try any more churches after he heard the preacher at that church blaming headaches and pain on sin. He knows that he didn't cause his physical pain but he can't take being around people who think this way.

My son watches a lot of news and always has. I think feeling like he is doing something helps with anxiety about what is happening in the world. He is concerned enough about what he sees happening that he learns everything he can about the law and rights and politics. He thinks things can be changed for the better. He would like to be more involved. The state representative we talked to said he could volunteer to work as a page for a week at the state capitol when he is older. I would love for him to do this.

I think watching the news has enabled him to realize how lucky he is even though he has to wear a painful brace for years. He knows it would be worse if he lived somewhere where he could not ge medical treatment. I think he developed even more empathy for people by watching and reading the news.

The one bright spot for us in our town is community musical theater. Musical theatre people are wonderful and different in a positive way and very supportive. They are the kind of friends I want for my son and I think they will be friends for life. Performing in musical theatre has helped my son with anxiety at least in learning to perform well whether he has anxiety or not.

Invite yourself to dinner with them, they mean? Scary stuff. Seriously, though, sympathy that you have to deal with this kind of thing.

DS8 isn't seriously anxious but does tend to latch onto concerns and not be deflected, or reassured by "it probably won't happen". I shield him from news (easy, we don't have TV and I get my news fix from the web and from listening to the radio in bed) but am starting to be concerned that he is, therefore, ignorant about world affairs. Once he is concerned about something, we have to discuss it properly, and have some kind of a plan for dealing with it.

Lori H.
Your descriptions of your town/homeschooling group give me the chills but that doesn't mean I doubt you. It seems like you have a good way of looking in but still not severing from the group outwardly. I give you alot of credit for withstanding it all. I thrive on diversity and find it much easier to navigate.

Your son sounds pretty cool. I'll bet all of these experiences he's going through now will really translate into something big and helpful in his future.
Best wishes.

Show up on their doorstep every. blinkin'. Saturday. morning. until they begin to meet you at the door with a knife and a dead chicken?

(Never mind how I know this.)

And best wishes to your son. I agree with what was said earlier-- he sounds like a cool kid.

You yourself are a pagan tax collector?

(Either that, or you are a door-to-door proselytizer who has been driving pagan tax collectors into madness . . . )

I don't know if this is true. More knowledge is not always reassuring. Sometimes, learning more makes you even more anxious. Frankly, I avoid stories about global warming at this point. I know how it works and what it's going to do, and reading about it makes me feel extremely agitated and upset. We do many, many things to reduce our contribution to it, but I feel deep and overwhelming despair if I read too much about it, and that can be paralyzing. I also avoided the news for a while during the height of the GWB presidency because it was making me intensely depressed about the state of the nation.

What's more, sometimes even firm knowledge doesn't seem to help much. DD has read all kinds of authoritative sources that say the sun is not going to burn out for billions of years, but she still worries about it.

If a child knows some things about an alarming subject but might lack other information that would be reassuring (eg: there are no volcanoes in our home state), then knowledge can be very useful. But I don't think there is a blanket statement to be made here.

You don't want to finally get a chance to colonize Antarctica?

Alternately, you could become a peak oilist. I think that's incompatible with global warming, but I could be wrong.

Well, one place where knowledge = hope is information regarding some of the progress we're making as a society on energy alternatives.

For example, the ability to store energy off the grid, as opposed to the current use-it-or-lose-it system, would greatly improve the efficiency of generated electricity.

This stuff takes captured industrial emissions and turns it into ethanol.

Plus, there is historical precedent to fall back on, where an environmental catastrophe triggered by humans led to a response and solution. We no longer burn coal or whale oil in our homes. Despite producing 25% of the world's commercial timber, US deforestation is no longer an issue, with forest coverage stable since 1907. Etc.

I just want someone to tell me how much energy we can reasonably expect to gather from solar, geologic, and tidal forces on a regular, sustained, and reliable basis.

Some people still burn wood in their homes. I know, because I've given wood (from an unused wood pile) away to wood-burning people. Because they are dirt poor.

We are not running out of oil. Not by a long shot.

http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/08/progress-to-unlocking-over-800-billion.html

US economy is far more diversified from oil now that ever before.

And NOTHING is sustainable. Second Law of Thermodynamics. In practical terms, this means that every machine wears out and also require human attention when they do run.

Solar/Wind are terribly inefficient from a thermo standpoint and this is why they are also cost prohibitive.

I was thinking of sustainability in the 4,000 year range.

My background is chemical engineering. I just like to know my general boundary conditions.

I really like geothermal. Iceland is cool.

Thanks! We've told him that, but the TV is flashier and if so many people think that... I'll read your post to him though, hearing it from someone who has been there might help reassure him that it's not just mom and dad trying to make him feel better.

LOL I'd have told him, "Show me the proof. If you believe it and science has proven it, then it should be easy." It would keep him busy for awhile researching.

Just pagan. I don't even enjoy dealing with my own taxes, let alone anyone else's.

Power is, itself, not always reassuring. Though IME it is, moreso, for those who are young enough to have not yet picked up on the concept of circumscribed possibilities.

DD likes to know what is on the news, though we generally sanitize, she catches some of it and asks questions. Studying about stuff is different, whether seeing volcanoes in HI or being in DR this past Feb and seeing the results of the fault as the salt water lake rises.

What I find, is that she has a sense of security that we are there for her. A friend of hers stood up too soon on the bus and then fell and hit her head, there was blood. She went to the nurses office and the mother, a lawyer with an investment bank, refused to pick her up unless she needed stitches. DD said the teacher kept an ice pack on the kid's head with a headband made of rubber gloves, all day. That kid isn't going to feel secure for her parents to be there whatever happens.

My question to DD was, "you know I would be there as fast I could jump in a taxi, right?" and she knows she can rely on me.

There is security, even from natural disasters, when you are young, that your parents are there to protect you. I remember the whole nuclear threat, going to school. Under the desk drills. Now that was ridiculous for children. But still, there was this knowledge they were doing stuff to protect you.

Ren