Having a quick conversation with your child after mission plan practice can help support new learning. Asking open-ended questions as opposed to closed-ended questions can help facilitate this conversation and guide your child to reflect on the practice (for example: ask your child ‘how did you feel about your practice?’ instead of ‘that went well, right?’).
The following open-ended questions may be helpful during these conversations:
- What did you learn about your worry/fear?
- How did your anxiety feelings change?
- How did you cope with your anxiety?
- What did you do well?
- How do you think the next practice will go?
Begin New Mission Plans
A good mission plan has a number of steps to reach one clear goal. Because of this, it’s very unlikely that you will reach all your anxiety management goals in one mission plan. As such, it is important to consider when to develop and begin new mission plans for another fear. Depending on the nature of the mission plans, some children can work on a few at one time. This is particularly useful if your mission plans involve behaviors that are hard to work on every day (like managing fear of dentist visits). For other mission plans that allow for frequent, consistent practice and are related to one of your child’s biggest fears, it may be helpful to wait until some progress has been made before adding another mission plan to the mix.
