Welcome to the seventh module of LUNA! This week, continue to help your child complete their activities and make progress on their plan. By this point, most of your child’s time should be spent practicing the activities in their plan of action.
Just like you did before, make sure your child creates a new schedule for this week using the Weekly Practice Plan worksheet. Your child can create this schedule based on a new plan of action, or they can continue working on the same plan from the previous week(s). Different children will need different levels of parent support to accomplish this. Remember, to create a new plan of action, look back at Module 4 and use the My Plan of Action worksheet.
Whenever your child practices an exposure activity, make sure they write it down in their Plan of Action Activity Log to keep track of their progress. In this module, you will learn more about how to help your child reflect after an exposure activity and put their anxious thoughts to the test.
You will spend about 30 minutes reading, watching videos, and doing activities. We encourage you to take breaks and come back to the material as much as you need.
Challenging Your Child's Expectations
In Module 5, George worked on his plan of action for his fear of germs and contamination. Let’s check in with him to see how it went.
Types of Thinking Errors
One benefit of using a plan of action is that it is designed to help your child challenge their ideas and expectations about their fears. Anxious thoughts can often trick us into assuming the worst. If your child is always assuming that something bad is going to happen, this can stop them from having new and enjoyable experiences. It can also stop them from doing things they need to do in their daily lives. Identifying your child’s expectations about their fears and using exposure activities to test those expectations can help your child learn new things about their fears and worries.
Unhelpful anxious thoughts are the result of something called thinking errors. The two types of thinking errors that generally cause anxiety are:
- Probability: Overestimating how likely it is that something bad will happen
- Consequences: Overestimating how bad it will be if something bad does happen
View some examples of these thinking errors below or view the PDF version.
