RUNNING A PARENT ANXIETY GROUP

When I reviewed curriculum for anxiety prevention, almost all the most effective ones (research based) had parent components.  Of course they did!  You cannot expect to make behavioral changes, especially in younger children, without the cooperation of their parents.

I totally love running my parent group.  I found that parents where very interested in the topic!  We ran the group very similar content wise to that of the kids.  Fortunately, COOL KIDS came with this manual.  I added additional information, videos on what is anxiety, articles on how we "get" anxiety, and also how deal in the moment and how to prevent anxiety.  Many parents expressed they had anxiety themselves, which we know from the research that parents with anxiety are more likely to "transmit" their anxious tendencies and responses to their children.  It is not inevitable, but we see it happen often.  I think my parents liked the group because many of them learned about how to deal with their own anxiety.

Click on my Parent Informational Letter to download a free sample

The toughest thing about the parent group was finding a common time for everyone to meet. Fortunately, I had a lot of moms who were 'stay-at-home'.  By the second year, I wound up offering a morning and an afternoon group.  For a few parents, I scheduled individual sessions a few times when they could take off work.  Attendance was often a problem as well, but I didn't want to be too hard on this.  I always emphasized that, "it only works if you come".  Also, I often offered coffee and bagels to sweeten the deal.  We had a group email and if 50% of the group could not come to a session, we would re-schedule. 

A large amount of the training was teaching and practicing relaxation techniques with the parents. We used apps, scripts and activities - we had parents try to schedule in relaxing types of activities, especially prior to bedtime.  We discussed what worked and what didn't work.  We probably spent the most time on 2 different types of relaxation and that was deep breathing (we called it cool breathing or belly breathing) and progressive muscle relaxation. The parents were more apprehensive to practice during group than the kids!  I'll go into what we used to practice relaxation in another blog. But for now, I'll show you one of our favorite resources was this video on YouTube.  Click on the image to see the video for yourself!

Belly Breathing, on YouTube by Common and Colbie Caillat is a favorite!

The parent manual in the Cool Kids program pretty much outlines session by session.  I added in a time for feedback, as the group sort of worked as a support group as well.  We also went over additional resources that anyone found to work on relaxation.  One of the first things we covered after the psycho-educational portion ("what is anxiety and how do you 'get' it") was to talk about how we respond to our children's anxiety.  This was were I saw the most change and most lightbulbs going off.  This article, by Go Zen, and online anxiety prevention program, sums it up nicely.  I printed this out and gave it to parents.  Click on the image to access a copy of it.  We'll talk about Go Zen in another blog post, as it is for older kids and also discuss the desensitization process. that we worked on.

Go Zen article, "5 Things You Should Never Say to an Anxious Child"

STARTING AN ANXIETY PREVENTION PROGRAM WITH YOUNG CHILDREN

If your experience has been anything like mine, you find out in a short time who the kids are that have anxiety issues in the classroom.  Often times it presents very differently from us adults.  We often see kids who act out that have underlying anxiety issues.  Or we see kids who avoid certain things, who don't like to speak in front of the group, or who are isolated but say they just don't want care about making friends anyway.

As a school social worker, I would often consult with parents to let them know my concerns and perhaps trying to make an outside referral.  Unfortunately many parents are strapped - they have no resources to pay for outside counseling (and there is no quality free or sliding scale providers close by), they are single parents working full time and are unable to take the child to an appointment or perhaps they currently lack the ability to get to the counseling session.  So my choice was to ignore these anxiety issues or work on them at school, knowing that if you make some headway on the anxiety, the child's overall functioning in the classroom would improve.

As I had mentioned before, my last gig was supporting an autism program in a  special education cooperative.  We had a wide range of functioning levels and therefore, I had to work with a variety of ages and abilities.  My itty bitties, or my kindergarten and 1st grade kiddos, tended to have a high level of anxiety, resulting in inflexibility to the max!  Having ASD, being afraid of change and the unknown, along with irrational thoughts was the perfect storm for significant anxiety.  So I went to town and searched and searched for the best Anxiety Prevention program (wanting a cognitive behavioral approach) that was researched based for children on the autism spectrum proved difficult.
At last, I found something!  But low and behold it was made in Australia.  Well, I ordered it, paid for air shipping and within a month or so received it.  I was extremely happy with it!  COOL KIDS, by Macquarie University, had the research and the format I was looking for.

The Cool Kids Program, by Macquarie University

The Cool Kids ASD Program, by Marcquaire University

The only draw back to the program, was it was a bit boring.  The pages were black and white and there sure where a lot of words on each page.  So, as I have done for all my other groups, I modified it.  This meant a lot of time in Power Point.  Additionally, I purchased on Ebay 2 puppets that represented the 2 characters in the program.

Austin is the anxious alligator

Calvin is the calm and cool crocodile

My students absolutely loved the puppets.  And actually, these guys (Calvin and Austin, the puppets) could run the group.  My kids would listen to them and behave for them.

Here is the one of the first lessons I did with my kiddos after we learned, "what are feelings" and then more in depth about the feeling of being "anxious" or "worried".  Feel free to download it!  Next post we will talk more about getting the group going and coming soon, the PARENT GROUP that I run for the kids in my Anxiety Prevention groups!

Click on Calvin to get your free download of my lesson