One step at a time

The activity

For an everyday fear, such as dogs, the dark or a new club: together you write the steps from easiest to hardest, and she practises each one until it feels easy before she moves up.

What it is for. Avoiding what she’s afraid of feels better at the time, and the fear tends to grow. If she faces it in steps she has helped to choose, each a little harder than the last, she finds out that she can cope with it.

• The first step. Read what to watch for, below, before you start. Then, on a calm day, ask her what she’s afraid might happen, listen to the whole answer, and agree a goal, in her words, for the top of the ladder: “Stroke Nana’s dog.”

Safety. Every step must be safe in itself: a calm dog whose owner has agreed, never a dog you don’t know; an adult within reach near water; nothing at a height she could fall from. A ladder is never used to make her face a person.

When to get help. If she tells you that someone is hurting her, that she is hurting herself, or that she does not want to be alive, stay calm, thank her for telling you, do not promise to keep it secret, and act that day, using the routes under “If you need help right now”, at the foot of every page. Stop the ladder and talk to your GP if the fear is getting worse, or is stopping her going to school, sleeping or seeing friends; if she has rituals she can’t stop, or keeps needing the same reassurance; if she has panic attacks; or if the fear began after something frightening happened and she is having nightmares or avoiding reminders of it.

The other four steps, and your part in it, are in the library.

The sheet that goes with it is free to print: The worry ladder.

It goes with

• When Reassurance Stops Working. For parents whose child is anxious and can’t be talked out of it, however often the adults around her try.
• Anxiety, by Age. For parents whose child’s worry has started to make decisions for her, with what helps at each age and when to ask for help.

The first chapter you open here is free to read in full.

Free on this subject

• Anxiety. What to do first, what helps, and who else can help. Free to read and to print.
• Emotional regulation. What to do first, what helps, and who else can help. Free to read and to print.