As you begin practicing mission plans, keep track of your child’s progress. When possible, ask your child to rate their anxiety using the anxiety scale before, during, and after they practice each activity. It might be helpful to print the anxiety scale out or make an anxiety scale that the child can use in real time to communicate their anxiety level.
If they are not able to accurately rate their anxiety verbally or using the anxiety scale, use the methods discussed in the previous section and monitor other anxiety indicators (for example, avoidance behaviors) to gauge their anxiety level. You can use the form at the end of this section to log your child’s progress.
Monitor Your Child While Completing Mission Plans
When your child is practicing mission plans, it is important to monitor them in some way in order to make sure that they are actually doing the practice. Facing your fears is hard, so your child might try to avoid them all together. They might also try to distract themselves during their mission plans (for example, looking at a phone or playing with a toy instead of focusing on the thing that makes them anxious).
Before your child practices a step in their mission plan, remind them what they need to do to successfully complete it. Also make sure you can see your child when they are completing it. This will allow you to monitor them to make sure they are focused and getting the most out of their practice.
Determine When the Step of Your Mission Plan is Complete
The step of your mission plan is complete once your child has reached the specified goal (for example, once Sally has sat down with a new group at lunch). Alternatively, for activities that do not have as clear an end point (for example, for Sally to play with her space toys in a “contaminated” area), you can check in on your child’s anxiety rating before and during the activity to help you determine when there is a significant decrease in anxiety. If they are unable to use the anxiety scale, you can look for physical signs (e.g., shaking less) and behaviors (e.g., removing hands from covering their eyes) that their anxiety has decreased.
Mission plan practice should not end too early, because we do not want to encourage escaping from feared situations. One way to know if the mission plan is over is when your child no longer expects a feared outcome to happen. For example, if a child with separation anxiety expects something bad to happen if you are in a separate part of the house, you might keep up the mission plan activity until your child no longer expects anything bad to happen to you (a friend or other caregiver might be able to check in with the child in this example). Another good rule of thumb for how long each activity should last is as long as it takes for your child’s anxiety to drop by at least half of what it was at the beginning. Anxiety should drop on its own – while your child is still fully engaged in the feared situation without distractions.
