AUTHOR KAMBOLIS OFFERS HELP FOR OUR ANXIOUS CHILDREN
Generation Stressed Play-based Tools to Help Your Child Overcome Anxiety By Michele Kambolis
Lifetree Media/greystone Books Ltd.
For W.H. Auden, the mid-20th century was the Age of Anxiety. He even published a long poem in 1947 under that title.
Many of us would suggest Auden jumped the gun. Our candidate for the real Age of Anxiety would be our own time, with its tweeting authoritarians, looming pandemic, climate change crises and a commonly felt sense of isolation and anomie.
Certainly we all know kids and teens who suffer from intense anxiety. Some go mute, some refuse to go to school, some obsess about their fears and some become angry and non-compliant. Some turn to substances to numb their pain.
All this was true even before COVID-19 gave us all a new and agonizing source of anxiety. Now many of us are worried about our kids and worried about how much they are worried. A PLOS One research paper published this year estimated that 10 per cent of children suffer anxiety disorders. An age of anxiety indeed!
Help is available for the worried parent. Vancouver therapist and author Michele Kambolis (whom readers may remember from her Sun columns in years past) published a book in 2014 that is timely now.
Generation Stressed addresses the issues of anxiety in children and suggests a number of steps that concerned parents can take to confront this growing problem.
Kambolis draws on her training in cognitive behavioural therapy, her experiences with her own children, and her lifelong study of Buddhism, among many other sources, to provide parents with easy-to-follow directions for exercises to do at home with your kids.
Some of these exercises involve identifying the habits of thought that drive anxiety and changing them, and some work the other end of the mind/body dialectic to prescribe simple mindfulness tools like “square breathing” that are demonstrably powerful in calming and energizing the anxiety-wracked body.
Some readers may find the authorial tone a bit off-putting.
Kambolis delivers her messages in a kind of exclamation point littered, perky New Age prose that could have benefited from some judicious editing.
That said, this is a book that many concerned parents will find very useful, particularly now.
Kambolis has provided a valuable service here, and enriches it with references to important pieces of anxiety research by other authorities, plus links to many free resources the reader can download from her website, michelekambolis.com.
Recommended.