emotionalreactions

Q: Dear WholeFamily Counselor, Hi, my concern is of my five-year-old son. I really think he has panic attacks and I don't know how to deal with this. It started about a month and a half ago at preschool. He said he was scared to be there alone without me anymore and wouldn't stay. I haven't been able to leave him there without a fight ever since. Nothing has happen to him there he just started fearing me leaving him. He gets hysterical and inconsolable. He also says that he feels like throwing up and that his throat feels funny. He says all this in the mist of his screaming and crying for me. I waited outside the door one day and he cried for a half hour. He gets very angry and will kick or hit things.

Dear WholeMom, I have a 21-month-old son and have just found out that I am pregnant. This second pregnancy was not planned. We live in a little two bedroom apartment and my husband and I just bought a house we are to move into in mid-October. The reason I mention this is that the baby is due in mid-November. How can I help my little boy adjust to two big changes that are happening right on top of one another? In addition, I am with him three days a week and am still nursing him (sometimes a couple of times a day). I want to wean him as I cannot nurse two children (even though I have read that the La Leche League says it's okay). We had also just bought him a potty and were going to start toilet learning-- he has started to tell us (once in a while) when he has to go.

I thought that Cary did a wonderful job of dealing with her son's distress. She was there for him without pressuring him, and eventually he was able to open up and unload a bit. He knows that she cares and he has a safe place to bring up difficult issues. Cary knows what is going on with her child and while it is distressing that she can't control everything in his environment, she is better off knowing than not knowing.

Yesterday evening, as I was folding laundry on my bed, my eleven- year-old son walked into my room and said, "Mom, I'm having one of those funny feelings again." He looked pale and taut with tension. He paced around my room, breathing nervously. "What happened?" I asked. Did you see something on T.V. or on the computer?" "No, its nothing like that. It was.... just the headline of a story in the teen newspaper supplement. I threw it in the garbage and I don't want to talk about it.

We moved across country two years ago and our 16-year-old daughter still hasn't forgiven us for it. She blames us for uprooting her and she misses her friends terribly. Because she was very attached to her friends, we promised her before we came that she could go back summers. As the summer approaches and she prepares to leave, the pain of separation from her old friends seems to surface even more. She has good friends here but she seems fixated on the fact that we've uprooted her. I want to let her express her feelings, but I feel she becomes abusive. Is it a mistake to keep sending her back? How can we help her resolve this painful issue?