By Dawn Huebner
A workbook your child fills in rather than a story you read aloud, teaching the same steps a therapist would use to shrink a worry.
The first thing to know is that your child works this one with a pencil. It's a course to go through, not a book for bedtime. Dawn Huebner is a psychologist, and this lays out her cognitive-behavioral method for a child to do alongside you over several weeks. Worries are drawn as tomato plants: they grow when you feed them attention, so the book teaches a child to stop watering them. There's a worry time, a set slot in the day when worries are allowed, so they aren't spilling into every hour. There are things to try when a worry turns up at the wrong moment. And nearly every page has a box to draw in or a line to write on, so the work only happens when your child picks up the pencil. Eighty pages, black-and-white line drawings, twenty short chapters that build on each other.
For the right family this is the most useful book on the shelf, because it's the one that asks a child to practice instead of just understand. The worry-time idea alone changes some households. A child who keeps circling back with the same anxious question gets a place to put it, and you get something to say back that isn't reassurance for the fortieth time. It has stayed in print for twenty years for a reason. Therapists hand it out, and it holds up. What it needs is an adult sitting beside your child, ten or fifteen minutes at a stretch, over a few weeks. Left on the shelf, it won't do much.