Changing expectations through mission plans

One of the benefits of mission plans is that they can help change children’s expectations about their fears. Identifying those expectations and testing them out during mission plans helps your child learn about their fears.

If you recall from Module 2, there are unhelpful and helpful thoughts. Unhelpful thoughts about an event that is not really dangerous can result in feeling anxious when there is not anything to be worried about.

Unhelpful thoughts are the result of thinking errors. The two types of thinking errors that generally cause anxiety are:

• Probability: Overestimating how likely it is that an unpleasant event will happen (for example, “the dog will bite me if I pet him”)
• Consequences: Overestimating how bad it will be if the unpleasant event does happen (for example, “if I am bitten I will go to the hospital”, or "it will be the worst thing ever if I am bitten")

Keep these two thinking errors in mind when reflecting on mission plan steps with your child after they have completed them. It is important to help your child process their thinking after doing a step in a mission plan or exposure. This way, you will help your child understand their thinking error and learn that they are totally capable of facing their fears. You will also help them begin to generalize these lessons to other fears. Since it is most effective to learn by doing, we want to emphasize completing the mission plan first, and then reflecting on what we learned after.
 
In LUNA’s child materials, there will be an updated Mission Plan Practice Log that includes a new column. This columns says, “Did you learn anything new?” After completing a mission plan step, ask your child the following questions to help them fill in that column: 

1. What about that exposure went better than you expected?
2. What did you learn about your worry/fear?
3. What was hard about it?
4. Did your anxiety feelings change from before to after the exposure? How so?
5. Did it get easier when you kept going?
6. Did [insert what feared outcome your child was expecting] happen? You might have thought [insert fear here] was going to happen but you were able to do it anyways!
7. Were there any good/fun things that happened because you did this mission plan?

We created a handout that contains these questions so you can keep them handy: Reflection questions to ask after practicing a mission plan step. Alternatively, you can make your own with this prompt:

Questions to help reflect after practicing a mission plan step

• What about that step went better than you expected?
• What did you learn about your worry/fear?
• What was hard about that step?
• Did your anxiety feelings change from before to after the step? How so?
• Did the step get easier when you kept going?
• Did [insert what feared outcome your child was expecting] happen? You might have thought [insert fear here] was going to happen but you were able to do it anyways!
• Were there any good/fun things that happened because you did this mission plan step?

Sometimes it may be hard for your child to think back to what their feared outcome was before doing the mission plan step. In this case, help them by providing some suggestions. For example, if your child avoids going outside because they are afraid of getting bitten by deadly insects, you may say something like:

It can also be helpful to point out how proud you are of your child for facing their fears. This can build their self-confidence and motivation to keep practicing. For instance, you can say something like:

Helping your child in these thinking processes after a mission plan step allows them to reflect on their experience and learn from the exposure. Ideally, over time, your child will be able to apply what they learned during these steps in their mission plan to other situations in their life when they come across their fears.

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