Anxious Kids, Anxious Parents:  7 Ways To Stop The Worry Cycle And Raise Courageous & Independent Children, by Reid Wilson and Lynn Lyons

This book is really aimed at children of anxious parents who themselves are being raised, often unconsciously, to be nervous and anxious themselves.  Given the extent to which anxiety is present within contemporary American society there are a great many anxious children who are being raised whose anxieties are unreasonable and intrusive, and some of them even get to speak to the UN or engage in fear-mongering politics for contemporary leftist causes that are driven by irrational fears and anxieties.  While this book does not talk about such larger aspects of fear and anxiety, it does give a lot of examples of children whose lives are harmed by anxiety that they have been reared to have by parents, and gives a lot of advice to parents on how children can be encouraged to be bolder and braver, and a lot of ways in which this can be sabotaged by well-meaning but ineffective parents.  I didn’t enjoy the book as much as I had hoped to, because the author’s perspective was not really what I would have preferred to see, but there is some use for some people with this book.

If you include the appendices, which are worth reading, this book is a bit more than 250 pages and is divided into twelve chapters and various supplementary material.  After a short introduction the authors discuss how worry moves in and grows and why it needs to leave children alone (1), after which the authors look at nature and nurture when it comes to child anxiety (2) and the problem of anxiety as a maladaptive strategy to the problems of early childhood helplessness (3).  After that there is a discussion about normalizing worry to deal with it (4) and then responding differently to it (5) and in recognizing the uncertainty of the world without being paralyzed by it (6).  There is a discussion about retraining the brain (showing the authors’ CBT interests) (7) as well as a discussion on the need to calm down the body (8) as well as look at the bigger picture (9) of which anxiety tends to focus on only a small part.  There is then a discussion of the attack of amnesia (10) and a plug for the Casey’s Guide (11) as well as a look at the need for children to move towards courage and independence (12).  The book then ends with a discussion of Casey’s Guide as well as three appendices that deal with anxiety disorders diagnosed in youth, national organizations that identify therapists with particular specialties, and children’s books that model what the authors consider to be healthy cognitive styles, after which there are acknowledgements, a discussion on how to find Casey’s Guide, and some information about the authors.

There are a few aspects about this book that I thought could have been handled a bit better.  For one, the author’s views on healthy cognitive styles are a bit cringy, as the authors fancy themselves to be experts on how people should think and this is generally not the best way to deal with such matters, especially given the obvious ways that the authors serve as shills for a particular way of dealing with anxiety.  There are a lot better ways to address the problem of anxiety than simply trying to promote a particular guide and then trying to make parents guilty for the ways that they have encouraged anxiety in their children.  Indeed, the book would have done a better job if it helped adults deal with anxiety better in such a way that the parents could then become positive role models for their children dealing with anxiety in the same kind of fashion.  Still, such a moral worldview is something that would be a bit beyond this book and its approach, unfortunately, making this book not as useful as it could have been otherwise.