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What kids know: Helping makes us happy
A reminder from the midst of my 10-year-old daughter’s anxiety crisis that helping other people really does help us
My daughter came home from sleep-away camp swearing she’d never go again. She missed us too much, she said. She cried every day. “I even cried in the POOL,” she told us, which is extra heartbreaking, because water is this child’s happy place.
Camp had given us a heads up that she was struggling, but chalked it up to normal homesickness, and assured us that with each day, she was enjoying herself more and missing us less.
This is not my daughter’s version of the story.
Regardless, after a couple of weeks chilling at home, she was set to begin 4 weeks of day camp, but only a few hours into her first day, we received a call from the counselors: She was crying. She missed us too much.
I’ll spare you the play by play, but suffice to say, we found ourselves in the midst of a full-blown anxiety crisis. It was horrible. There was so much crying (hers), there were emergency calls with therapists, there was medication adjustment. There was depletion (mine).
Following guidance from her therapist, we agreed on a plan: The worry couldn’t win. We could acknowledge it, but…
