How to Help Children Overcome Fears and Phobias

Episode Transcript

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

Hi, everyone, welcome to the show. I’m Dr. Nicole, and today we are talking about how to help kids overcome specific fears or phobias. Most kids develop specific fears about something over the course of their childhood, but these fears tend to go away without requiring any kind of significant intervention. However, some kids get very stuck on specific fears, they may even become what we call phobias. And these can impact all parts of a child’s life and even a parents’ and a family’s life. In my clinic, we have definitely seen an increase in specific fears and phobias, especially around health-related issues since the pandemic started. The good news is there are really helpful research-backed ways to help kids through this, and I’ve got Dr. Dawn Huebner on the show today to talk about some of the things we as parents can unintentionally do that might make fears worse in kids, as well as what we can do to actually improve these issues. Dawn has been on the show before, you all loved her, we got great feedback, so I invited her back to talk about this timely topic, especially because she has a new book series coming out about it. For those of you who don’t know her, let me tell you a bit about her.

Dr. Dawn Huebner is a psychologist, parent coach and the author of more than 10 books for children, including the perennial best sellers What to Do When You Worry Too Much, and Outsmarting Worry. Her newest series, Dr. Dawn’s Mini Books About Mighty Fears, speaks with warmth and humor to children who are struggling with specific phobias, while teaching the tools needed to break free. Her books are very practical. they are relatable. They have sold well over a million copies in 23 different languages. She has been featured on many different news and information outlets, and is frequently interviewed by popular parenting magazines. Dawn, it’s such a pleasure to have you back with us today. Welcome.

Dr. Dawn Huebner

Thank you. Thank you for inviting me.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

So like I said, we have noticed here at my clinic that there’s definitely been an uptick in the number of referrals coming in for kids who are struggling with specific fears and phobias — I would say around health in particular, maybe a few other things, but health specifically, since the whole covid pandemic started. I’m wondering if that’s something that you are noticing as well, and sort of want to open this conversation with talking about: When we say specific fears, when we talk about phobias, what are we really talking about there?

Dr. Dawn Huebner

We are talking about fear that’s out of proportion to actual danger. And it’s tricky right now, because there is actual danger around us, right? So we all have a part of the brain called the amygdala. That part of our brain is always on the lookout for potential danger, it’s kind of paying attention to anything that might cause us harm. And when we see or hear about something that might be problematic for us, that part of our brain sets off an alarm and makes us feel afraid; cautious and afraid. And there are lots of messages around us these days for both adults and children about bad things that are happening or that could happen. So there’s a heightened sense all around us about danger, which is why I think we are seeing an uptick in worry and fear.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

Yeah, for sure. And I think for kids who maybe were a bit prone to anxieties around this stuff before the pandemic, this has sort of added fuel to that fire, and maybe even a piece of it is parents spending more time around their kids who are having some of these high-end worries are now recognizing: “Whoa, this probably goes beyond just a garden variety type of fear, and I need to really look at this for my child.” So I would love to have you touch on that, because as I mentioned in the intro, kids are afraid of things. I mean, as adults, we get afraid of things, right? Being afraid of things is sort of a normal thing, and lots of times they go away on their own. So help us think about how to distinguish that or how do we know if this is really becoming a substantial problem for our child?

Dr. Dawn Huebner

So what distinguishes a normal worry or fear, “normal” from a problematic one, is not what the fear is about. It’s not the content of the fear. It’s the impact of it. So when a fear or worry starts to get in the way in significant ways, that’s when parents need to be paying attention. So when it becomes difficult for a child to go to school or to do activities, or to sleep independently or to eat in a normal or healthy way, when the fear starts to make it difficult for a child to do the things they want to do or that other kids their age are able to do, that’s when it makes sense to intervene. You talked about the fact that fears are really common, and that’s true for both adults and children. And often there’s a kernel of truth to our fears, right? There is something to be alert to. There are things that can potentially go wrong. But we often make the mistake of thinking that being nervous or being afraid is the same as being in danger. And those actually are not the same thing. We feel nervous or afraid around potential dangers, but potential danger is different from actual danger, and we need to learn how to sort that out. The good news is that even children can be taught to make those distinctions, to understand that being afraid is not the same as being in danger, and how to begin to push back some against their fears.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

That’s such a good point. Because we do need to normalize for ourselves and our kids that there are things that are reasonable to be afraid of. Fears come up. We can feel fear or anxiety about something, and yet at the same time, recognize we aren’t actually in danger. And I think holding those two things at the same time is hard, and it’s not something that we often explicitly talk about for kids. And I think this gets to an important point, because often, parents wonder, “What are the most common fears?” Or “Are there certain fears that I should be concerned about?” And your point is really, that it’s actually not the specific fear that’s the issue. It’s the process of it.

Dr. Dawn Huebner

That’s right. And you just said something a moment ago that I wanted to build on, and that is that we often feel afraid about something, but that’s different from actually being in danger. Parents often spend time talking to their children in logical ways, trying to get kids to see “You are not in danger”, or “There’s nothing to be afraid of.” Understanding that intellectually only makes the smallest bit of difference. It’s getting it at sort of a deep, experiential level that really makes the difference. And that’s why one of the main things we need to do in the face of these big fears is something called exposure, which is giving a child the experience of moving towards the things that make them feel nervous, and then seeing that nothing bad happens. And that’s the way that change happens at a true brain level at a way that really lasts over time.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

I want to highlight one of the things that you just said about what we tend to do as adults when a child is expressing a fear about something. We do sort of tend to address that logically by saying something like “Oh, there’s nothing to be afraid of”, or “You don’t need to be afraid of that”, which is very well-intentioned on the part of the adult, if not a little self-serving, in that “I need you to not feel afraid of this because I feel more comfortable when you are not distressed.” But it’s that idea of trying to convince them they don’t need to be afraid when actually, as you said earlier, the thing that they are feeling afraid about might be a reasonable thing to feel afraid about. The goal isn’t to get kids to not feel afraid, right? The goal is to help them to recognize that “I can feel fear or anxiety about something and can handle that, and don’t need to let that impact me.” I think that’s a real shift for people to make in terms of how they think about it.

Dr. Dawn Huebner

Absolutely. So there’s a term that’s called accommodation or parental accommodation, which means parents changing what they would normally say or expect or do in an attempt to reduce their child’s anxiety, and research has shown that 97% of parents of anxious children regularly accommodate the anxiety, meaning they try to buffer the situation, they try to reassure their child, they allow them to not move into the situation, they provide additional supports, they whatever. And parents do that coming from a very well-intentioned place, as you said. They do it because they love their child. They see their child is suffering and they don’t want them to be suffering. And also, a child’s anxiety often triggers the parent’s anxiety, and so the parent feels better also when they just try to make this anxiety go away. But it’s pretty clear that the more we try to stamp anxiety about, the more intent we are in making it go away, the more tightly it holds on. And so there is this really important shift that has to do with the goal of changing one’s relationship to anxiety, rather than getting rid of the anxiety. And it’s only after we begin to change our relationship to it, to understand: “My anxiety is uncomfortable, but it isn’t dangerous”, or “I’m feeling anxious, and I can ride it out.” So it’s kind of making those changes in our perception, our understanding, our relationship to our anxiety that really makes a difference. And that’s something that both parents and children can learn how to do.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

Yeah, and it’s such an important shift. What are some of the common ways that you see kids maybe asking — they are not directly asking for accommodations from parents, but they are seeking out some kind of support, they are expressing their fear? I mean, obviously, avoidance is a big one, right? “I don’t want to do that. I’m not going to do that.” What are some of the other common ways that kids demonstrate this?

Dr. Dawn Huebner

So when you think about anxiety, you think about it triggering the fight, flight or freeze response. And then you can think of each part of the response and the behaviors that go along with it, right? So the fight part of fight flight or freeze is getting kind of oppositional, “I don’t want to do that, that’s boring, you can’t make me, I’m not going to do it”, right? Parents sometimes misinterpret that as misbehavior or as defiance, but it’s not. It’s often anxiety-related, that’s important to understand. The flight part is trying to escape the possible danger. So avoiding, backing away from, clinging to a parent, crying. And the freeze part is shutting down, typically, kind of literally freezing in response to whatever the child is afraid of. So the things that we most commonly see are avoidance, as you said, reassurance-seeking and refusal, which is a form of avoidance.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

Reassurance seeking — Those parents who come in and describe what happens, where the child is repeatedly asking them the same questions, or going through the same scenarios, and they are like, “Oh, my head’s going to explode if my child says this to me or asks this one more time”, and helping them see that that’s part of this pattern, actually, of how the child is trying to engage the parent in soothing those fears, which, I think is so easy for parents to fall into that, right? It’s like, “My child is saying to me, ‘But it’s okay, right? But it’s okay, but are we going to be okay? But the dog’s not going to bite me?” And we think we are doing a good thing by constantly reassuring them, answering their questions and saying, “Yup, it’s going to be fine. Nothing’s going to happen.” But actually, that just feeds this cycle of fear, doesn’t it?

Dr. Dawn Huebner

Right. And it’s tricky, because reassurance and avoidance, both of those things feel they are working. So when a parent reassures a child, the child calms down. Or when a child is allowed to avoid something that they feel afraid of, they no longer feel afraid. So it seems like okay, that was an effective technique, right? But it’s a very short-term benefit, and it cements the anxiety pattern in the long run. It makes it such that every time the child feels nervous, they need to either back away or seek reassurance. Anxiety really craves certainty, and so kids get very intent on having their parents guarantee that a bad thing isn’t going to happen. Either verbally guarantee it, “I pinky swear that you are not going to throw up”, or behaviorally guarantee it, “I will be first in line at pickup”, right? And, again, those kinds of things, which I call safety behaviors — so things that children insist on in an attempt to keep themselves safe, those kinds of safety behaviors bring relief, and it seems they are effective, but they are actually part of the problem. And what parents and kids can do is learn how to recognize those safety behaviors, those things that they are doing in an attempt to relieve the anxiety in the short term, and they can begin to chip away at them, right? You can’t do it all at once, because that’s pulling the rug out from under a child, and that’s not going to feel good to anybody, right? But you can, you can gradually chip away at those safety behaviors. And that is a very effective way of changing this whole pattern, changing a child’s experience of their anxiety and how to respond to it.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

It’s great. And I want to get into sort of the process of how to shift into this, what the practical things are that parents can do. I want to talk about exposure, but before that, one of the things that I think that you do so well in your books — and for those who are listening, who are not familiar yet with Dawn’s books, they are written for kids. They are written to really help the child understand or relate to what’s going on. And Dawn, one of the things that I think you do that’s so important in all of your books, and especially in looking through this new series on this topic of fears and phobias, you help kids understand what’s going on in their brain before you even get to the “Okay, now, here are the strategies we are going to use,” because that anchoring and that understanding of “Your brain’s playing tricks on you”, or the danger signals, what’s going on in the amygdala, and talking about that in a way that they can understand, that’s such a powerful and important foundation for helping them then to be willing to engage with the new strategies and the new ways that we are going to be doing things. I think that that piece is overlooked a lot, it’s sort of, “Well, that’s an adult thing to understand what’s going on in the brain.” And it’s like, well, actually, kids need to know what’s going on so that they understand: Why is this happening to me in the first place?

Dr. Dawn Huebner

Right, and kids as young as 5 or 6 can be taught pieces of this. It is important to do that in part because it empowers kids. It helps them to move from feeling the victim of their anxiety to feeling they can understand it and do something about it. And it’s also normalizing. Anxious kids often feel ashamed of the things that they have trouble with. They look around and they see that their peers are able to do things that they are not able to do, and they feel bad about themselves, and sometimes they deny that they are afraid, while at the same time, they are refusing to do new things or whatever. And so this normalizes the fear, and it teaches kids about what’s happening or why it’s happening, in ways that they can easily relate to. And then it teaches a set of skills. And I always try to teach in a way that gives kids sort of that sense of “Oh, that makes sense. I understand that. I can do that”, because I want to empower children.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

Yeah, that’s so important. That’s a piece of breaking the cycle too, that kids and parents get into, of parents needing to be the constant providers of reassurance or accommodating it, this empowerment piece is big for kids as they grow to understand, “Oh, there are things I can do.” And so grounding them in that understanding of what’s happening, yeah, that is so empowering. Let’s talk about exposure, and let’s talk about what we actually mean when we say exposure, because I can imagine some people listening, especially if it’s a parent who maybe has some anxiety themselves, the word exposure, or the idea that we are going to expose kids to the very things that are scary for them, can bring up a lot of intense feelings for adults and kids. So let’s talk about what we mean by exposure.

Dr. Dawn Huebner

We mean that we are helping children move towards the things that make them nervous without using their safety behaviors, without doing the things that they are accustomed to doing to try to protect themselves. And the analogy that I think works well is that of getting used to the water in a swimming pool. So exposure is related to habituation, to getting used to something. And if you think about getting into a cold swimming pool and staying in the water and swimming or playing, you eventually get used to the water. It doesn’t feel cold to you anymore. And that happens because your brain and your body acclimates, and our brain and our body is set up to do that. And so we can use that concept when we are thinking about a whole variety of worries and fears and ways that anxiety manifests itself. We can help kids get used to those situations in the same way they get used to the cold water in a pool. So the reason I use the pool analogy is there are a couple of ways to get into a pool. You can jump in and get used to the cold water all at once, or you can go step by step and get used to it a little bit at a time. And when we are doing exposure, we most typically do a step-by-step approach. So we are having a child get used to the thing that they are nervous about, or move towards the thing that makes them feel afraid just a little bit at a time. We don’t want to shove a child into the water, that’s not a useful way to do this, and we don’t want to allow them to endlessly stay up on the pool deck and not get in at all right? So we want kids to learn to step in, even if it’s just putting their toes in to start, and then to progressively move further and further into the situation.

And as we are doing exposure, there are actually two things that a child is getting used to, and both are important. One is the specific situation: So they are getting used to sleeping alone, or they are getting used to being outside where there might be bees, or they are getting used to the possibility of making mistakes on their homework. They are getting used to this specific situation. And they are also getting used to their fear. They are getting used to what it feels to feel unsure or nervous or apprehensive, and to stay in it anyway. And both of those are helpful.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

Absolutely. And I think the key there is that exposure, when it’s done well, is done in increments that stretch the child without breaking them. I think of that rubber band, sort of, we want to stretch them. They need to be stretched, but we don’t want to stretch them so much that they snap. And sometimes people will say “Oh, well I already do that, I make him do the thing. He’s scared, I just drag him kicking and screaming, and I make him do it.” To use the pool analogy, parents are like, “Oh, you are scared of the water? I’m going to throw you in, and you will see.” And actually, that’s not what we are talking about here, right? Because yes, to your point earlier, there might be a short-term benefit from that, like okay, you got them to do the thing. But you have done nothing in the big picture to help them become more resilient around those fears, to help them acclimate to that. And so that’s sort of the other extreme, right? There’s the extreme of constantly accommodating and allowing a child to avoid, and then there’s the other extreme of exposing them way too fast to way too much, and neither of those things is going to get us where we want to be.

Dr. Dawn Huebner

Right. Another common mistake is to so successfully distract a child that they don’t realize what they are doing. So to dangle some kind of huge reward or to, in some way, kind of trick a child or distract a child, so they don’t realize what they are doing. There is no gain from that. Children need to know that they are challenging themselves, in order to benefit. When kids are taught about all of this, children are surprisingly good at identifying medium-sized challenges. And we can talk about it, we don’t want too big a challenge because that’s going to be too hard. And we don’t want too small a challenge because you are not going to get anywhere, it’s going to take too long. We are looking for medium-sized steps. Kids can partner with parents at finding those medium sized steps and doing them. And if a child and parent are trying to practice some exposure activity, and it turns out to be bigger than anticipated, we don’t want the child to get out of the pool entirely. We want them to stay in and take a single step back. There’s an art to that, the parents can learn how to help their child make the step a little bit smaller, even mid-activity. Add a little bit of more support to the situation so that the child is able to keep doing it.

That brings up another point, which is to say that exposure is intentional. So it’s going to take forever for the situation to change if parents and children wait until the child is naturally in a situation to try to get the child to respond differently to that situation. So exposure is something that we do on purpose. We choreograph it. The setup, the practice. And the best thing is to work for 15 minutes a day. It’s not a super long time, but to have it be intentional, short, frequent practice sessions, where it’s explicit. The child knows, “I’m practicing challenging my fear of dogs right now” or “I’m practicing losing games right now”, or whatever it is that you are practicing. It’s intentional, specific, frequent practice.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

Yeah. Let’s take people through an example. I’m thinking of one of the new books in your series, it’s about the fears of animals. Whether it’s the child who’s afraid of bees because they are scared of being stung, or they are afraid of dogs or whatever. Let’s walk people through how you might think about a series of exposures, because obviously, we are aiming for these medium-sized opportunities of not just avoiding being outdoors all together because there might be a flying insect, but also not forcing a kid outside where there’s a beehive. So how are you thinking about it? Give some examples, maybe of what graded exposures might be, or where you might start, and then some of the steps you might take, just to get people’s wheels turning of how to be thinking about this, for whatever their child’s specific fear is.

Dr. Dawn Huebner

Right. So first, it’s important to make sure that you are exposing your child to the right thing. And for a fear of bees, we are not exposing to bee stings, we are exposing to being outside where there might be bees or where there are bees, and that’s really important. So just to stick with the fear of bees, you start wherever your child is. So for some children, that means looking at pictures of bees, or watching videos of bees on YouTube and reading fact books about bees. And then you move to going outside, maybe adjacent to places where there might be bees. So being near flowers, but kind of across the lawn from them, or being many yards away from an outdoor garbage can with bees flying around, and you gradually move to getting closer. And as you are doing exposure, you want to be intentional about it. So it helps to make it creative, and to add some elements that are kind of fun and interesting. So for a fear of bees, you might do something like go on a photo safari and have your child take pictures of bees, and use a zoom so they can do it from far away to start with, and then ultimately get closer. Or you might send your child on a scavenger hunt, giving them challenges to look for in places where they could encounter bees. Or you might have a contest to see who can get closest to a place where there might be bees. So you can do games, you can do art projects, you can do fun activities, you can involve other family members, but you are very deliberately thinking about ways to have a child practice the things that they are avoiding, the things that are making them frightened, moving closer and closer and closer to, in this situation, where there might be bees. And a part of the bee one is also teaching kids to stay put when they see a bee. Sometimes kids who are afraid of bees will go outside, but as soon as they see a bee, they run. And so you might have challenges that are gradually building on having a child increasingly stay put when they see the bee.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

I think that’s really helpful, thinking through different steps there. And one of the questions that I can hear lots of parents right now probably asking in their mind is “Okay, I get that. And what do I do when my kids start saying, ‘I’m afraid, I can’t do it. I don’t want to stand here on the edge of the lawn or they start crying. What do I do then?”

Dr. Dawn Huebner

Yeah. So it’s a good question. One thing is you want to make sure that you are doing small steps and starting at the right place. You want to start just outside your child’s comfort zone. But basically, when a child is in the midst of an exposure and saying “I’m afraid”, parents can empathize with that. “I know, that’s a false alarm”, or “Your worry is telling you that this is really dangerous. Let’s just stand here and see what happens.” So it helps to have educated a child, as you have talked about, about what’s going on in their brain, so parents can reference that when you are actually in the situation. And with some kids, you can do something like, “Let’s do some breathing to calm down”, or “Let’s play a quick game to redirect attention.” What you don’t want to do is give a guarantee that the bad thing is not going to happen. So you don’t want to say, “I promise you are not going to get stung. The bee is nowhere near you.” You don’t want to give a guarantee like that. And you also want to try not to allow your child to leave. So you do want to acknowledge, “I can see that you are scared, you are just learning how to get used to being around bees,” and then you can add some encouragement. “You are a strong kid. I know you can do this. I want you to stay in the water,” if you have used the pool analogy with your child. So you are wanting to do kind of a combination of acknowledging the fear, and encouraging your child to be brave and to kind of stay in the situation.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

I think that’s so helpful for people to picture how to support kids in those moments. And I think too, when we are talking about exposures, time can also be a piece of that, right? We are doing this for three seconds, or we did it for three seconds last time, we are doing it for five seconds, or we are doing it for 30 seconds. And that can also be a tangible anchor, I think, especially for younger kids who maybe really lack a sense of grounding and time and space, to know: this isn’t going to go on forever. We are not going to be standing here. You are feeling this fear, you are feeling all these things in your body, you are having all of these thoughts, and this isn’t going to go on forever. We are practicing feeling this now. And then when the big hand gets to whatever, then we are going to go back to the swings or go inside or whatever. And I think that can be helpful, too.

Dr. Dawn Huebner

Right. And for kids who are a little older, even as old as 7, I would say, 6 or 7, you can talk to them about bravery. So bravery is not the absence of fear. Bravery is feeling afraid and doing something anyway. And so you can talk about how your child is building their bravery, and when they say that they are afraid, you want to acknowledge and empathize with that. But you can also say, “That tells us that we are doing just the right thing. Your brave is getting bigger. Hang in there, you are getting braver.” So the goal is not to not feel afraid. The goal is to retrain your brain. Feeling afraid is actually a good thing, but we want to talk about that in a way that a child doesn’t feel a parent isn’t acknowledging the fear, right?

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

I think that’s so helpful, what you just shared, and helpful for us as the adults too, because it can be unsettling to try to help kids practice with these exposures, because it triggers us too, seeing our child uncomfortable. And so the same things that we are teaching kids about their brain and about being brave, and how if you are feeling afraid, that’s actually good, it means we are doing it, that’s very reassuring for us as the adult in the situation too.

Dr. Dawn Huebner

Right. And parents can develop self-talk. So parents can say to themselves, “My child is afraid, but they are not in danger.” Or “I can help my child to be brave”, because there is otherwise this impulse to rescue, and it’s an understandable, loving impulse. It just happens to not be helpful in that situation, right? So yes, we absolutely can learn how to coach ourselves to hang in there, as well as coaching our children.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

One of the things that I noticed in this series of books as I went through them: You build a lot of interesting facts, pictures, weird science things, throughout your explanation of all of these things. And I’d love for you to just touch on what your goal is for that, because I think that’s helpful for parents. I always encourage parents to go through books, understand what it is your child it is looking at and reading with this stuff, and sometimes parents might go “Well there’s all these random images and facts about different things, and oh, here’s a weird thing that you might not have known,” and I know that you are being very intentional about why you are doing that. So I’d love for you to share why.

Dr. Dawn Huebner

Yeah, I was going to say, they are not random at all. Throughout these books is something called Fun Facts. And so there are various factoids about the topic of the book. And so an example might be in the animal book, there is information about “Spiders taste through their feet”, or “The number of times in a lifetime that a snake sheds its skin.” And there are two purposes with the fun facts: One is that they are a form of exposure. So it gets the child thinking about the thing that they are afraid of, but in a new way. And when we evoke curiosity, that in some ways is kind of an antidote to fear, or it uses a different part of the brain than fear does. So that’s what’s happening. And then also, it’s a way to just keep kids engaged with the book. So kids are sometimes resistant to talking in a focused way about something that’s hard for them or scary for them, and so it’s interesting. It was fun to find the fun facts about — one of the books is facing mighty fears about throwing up, and there is just a treasure trove of information online about vomiting. I had to sort of pick out the ones that were at the right level of intensity for a book like this, it was fun.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

It’s brilliant, though, because as you said, it’s meeting that goal of some sort of low-level exposure, while also piquing their curiosity kind of, at a developmentally good level, and kind of hooking them and getting them in. And, yeah, it’s a really smart way of doing it. And I learned several new facts about the topics of these books that I did not know before. So that was great. I want you to share with people what is coming out in this series. This is a little different than some of the standalone books that you have done, because this is a series around specific fears. So tell us which ones you are starting with, which ones are out now, what’s coming, so that people can anticipate that, because I would expect that this is probably a series that many families are going to want to collect some or all of them, depending on what’s going on with their kids. So talk to us about what you have got planned for this.

Dr. Dawn Huebner

Yeah. So it’s interesting, because my other books about anxiety tend to be about anxiety or worry broadly, and I was getting lots of questions about “Okay, I understand that, but how do I apply it to this fear or that fear?” So this series is the answer to that, it’s kind of how to apply the concepts to the specific fears. And families would buy whatever books are relevant to their child. So the first set of books is, the titles all start with Facing Mighty Fears. So Facing Mighty Fears About Trying New Things, About Health, About Throwing Up, and About Animals, and the Animals book covers dogs, spiders, snakes, and bees. And then there are books that will be coming after. Right now the topics that I have for the next set of books are what I’m calling “Baddies”, which is various kinds of bad guys and villains Facing Mighty Fears About Baddies, About Mistakes and About Separation or being alone, and I will keep generating these books as long as there are more topics to do. And each one stands alone, so if your child is only afraid of one thing, you just buy that one book and that will cover it.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

Yeah. Although I do think it’s interesting. I think it’s helpful in normalizing, even for all kids, as I was looking through them, these books are really relevant for any child, even if they are not having a specific phobia about that thing. They might know a kid who is, or just the normalizing of the things that our brains do, of the emotions that we have, giving kids tools, and because you have written them in a way that really does hook them in with the interesting facts, and the illustrations are cool. I think that there’s even an element of kids just being able to learn more about themselves, their feelings, resilience, even if they don’t maybe have that specific fear.

Dr. Dawn Huebner

Yeah, I think that’s especially the case for the books like Trying New Things and Mistakes. There are lots of kids that are really apprehensive about new experiences, and that book kind of focuses on how there’s a difference between something being new and something being dangerous. And so we can learn how to make that distinction about “Am I afraid because this is new, or because it’s dangerous?” And the way we cope with that, or what we do with that is different, right? And it’s often we are afraid because it’s new, but there are ways to orient ourselves or to ease into a situation that makes it less scary. And so a book like that, I agree, is relevant to a really broad swath of kids, even kids that we don’t classically think of as anxious.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

Such great resources. You write these in such an approachable way. It always strikes me too, when I read new books that you come out with, how much more time and brain intensive it is to write something geared towards a child. You look at it and you think, “Oh, it’s a kid’s book, oh, that’s simple, look at all the pictures”, whatever. Actually, I think it’s probably infinitely more difficult to write these things in a way that is understandable and relatable for kids, as opposed to adults, so I give you a tremendous amount of credit for that.

Dr. Dawn Huebner

Thank you.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

So tell us where people can find the books, and then also where they can go to get more information. I know you have got a lot of great resources available online. So where can people go?

Dr. Dawn Huebner

Yeah, so the books are available wherever books are sold. You can order them through bookstores or any online seller, and also through my publishers. There are links to my publishers on my website. If you put my name into a search engine, you will come up immediately with my website. There are lots of resources for parents, as you mentioned, there are articles and tips for parents, and a description of a video course that I have for parents about anxiety, and descriptions of my various books. And each of these books has a resource section in the back that talks about other books and websites that I think are really helpful, and national organizations that speak to anxiety. So there are resources in the backs of these books, and a pretty extensive note to parents and caregivers about how to use these books.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

Yeah. And we will put the links to all of those things in the show notes for all of you to be able to easily access them. Dawn, this is such an important topic. As we are wrapping up here, what’s one thing that you really want parents, caregivers, to take from this conversation about specific fears and phobias and how to help kids?

Dr. Dawn Huebner

It’s that anxiety is treatable. Anxiety is so uncomfortable, and it can become hugely handicapping if it’s left alone. But it is so treatable in very specific ways, and there’s plenty that parents can do. There’s good self-help literature out there that parents can begin with, and I certainly encourage going to a professional if a parent feels stuck or the anxiety feels like it’s really getting out of control, but whether you are working with self-help materials or working with a professional, things change in really dramatic ways, and that’s exciting. It’s exciting for parents, it’s empowering for kids, and it’s transformative. And that’s one of the things I absolutely love about this work, is that things get so much better.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

Such an important message of hope. So empowering for kids and for parents. Thank you, Dawn, for being here with us today and thank you for the books that you continue to write to help all of us. We appreciate you very much.

Dr. Dawn Huebner

Thank you for having me.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens

And thanks as always, to all of you for being here and for listening. We will catch you back here next time.