My 3 yr. old is scared of the wind. He freaks out if I open the windows in my home and refuses to go outside with even the smallest of breezes. I tell him it won’t hurt him, but I also refuse to close the windows when he’s acting like this. I encourage him to come outside and play with me on his swing or ride his tractor, but he refuses. Any advice on how to get him past this? It started last summer during a terrible storm, when my husband made me take him down in the basement, to wait for it to pass. The sky was green and it sounded like a tornado, which we found out later that there were several that day in surrounding areas that did touch down.
Extreme weather phobias are relatively common. Gradual exposure to the feared situation is the most effective way to conquer a phobia. It may also be helpful for you to explain to your child that many children’s brain’s get stuck on this kind of worry and that it is much like a hiccup in his mind that is remedied by following a few steps.
First, help your child come up with a nickname for his fear: “Worry bug” or “Mr. windy” are appropriate. Referring to a nickname when a child’s fear is triggered serves two functions that will help him conquer his fear: 1) it will help him maintain objectivity about the fact that his brain is hiccupping, and 2) it will help the parent avoid reinforcing the child’s fears by reassuring him, explaining to him why he shouldn’t be so afraid, etc. It is preferable to use the nickname when addressing his fears. If your child isn’t particularly verbal or doesn’t like the idea of naming his fear, it is not necessary.
Next, construct a hierarchy of situations involving wind beginning with situations that are wind-related, but which elicit low levels of fear. I use a “Fear Thermometer” from 1-10 (a picture of one is on the opening page of my website) to have children rate how scary a particular situation is to them. “10” is the scariest and “1” not scary at all. If your child is too young to understand this numerical system, make a chart of 3-5 faces depicting varying levels of distress and fear and use it to enlist your child in rating the situations you will ask him to rate to make your hierarchy. Now, you must get creative. With each idea you invent, ask your child; “how scary on your fear thermometer would that be?” Your child will show distress doing this, and may in fact want to avoid it, since even discussing it is a type of exposure. Don’t be deterred. Move slowly, take baby steps, but do not allow your child to avoid this. Rewards are very helpful to increase a child’s motivation to persevere. I use them in my practice regularly and encourage parents to set up a reward system. The reward needs to be delivered as close to the desired behavior as possible to be maximally effective and the reward needs to be sufficient to encourage your child. It is not bribery: REWARDS MOTIVATE!
Below is a sample hierarchy of a hierarchy that might be appropriate:
Look a drawing or painting of a windy day-3
Listen to my Mom/Dad make wind noises-2
Listen to Mom/Dad make wind noises while he makes a bush or tree shake like in the wind-4
Watch a video of a breezy day-4
Watch a video of a windy day-6
Listen to a weather report about wind conditions-4-8
Have Mom/Dad read a book to me about a windy day-5
Sit in the car at a windy spot and watch the windy day-6
Sit in the car on a windy day and open the window a crack-8
Stand/play outside on a lightly breezy day-7
Stand/play outside on a windy day-8
Stand/play outside on a very windy day-10
Watch a movie with a big wind storm-9
Watch a movie with a small tornado-10
For your child to habituate to the situations he fears, he must have massed exposures at each level of the hierarchy, starting with the situations with the lowest fear thermometer ratings. Massed means, as many as it takes such that he can eventually do that particular exposure with out any fear thermometer at all. Make a special working game of it on a daily basis and perhaps several times a day. The more exposures your child does, the easier it will become and the more rapidly he will conquer his fear. You might introduce it in a manner similar to this: “Now it’s time for us to do our Worry bug exposure game and for you to work toward bossing back Worry Bug and earning some great rewards.” Each time you play the Worry Bug game, the goal is for your child to do enough exposures (over and over and over again) for his fear thermometer to reduce while he is doing the exposures to 0 or at least half of what they were when he started that particular day.
In order for habituation to occur during exposures, your child must also agree to refrain from doing Safety Behaviors. You must also reduce and eventually eliminate your participation in Safety Behaviors. Safety Behaviors are behaviors done to reduce the level of exposure or quell your child’s distress in the face of the feared situation. Safety Behaviors that your child may have developed include: covering his ears or eyes when he thinks it’s windy, asking for weather reports from you, seeking reassurance that wind will not come up, avoiding going outside, clinging, etc. Rather than reassure him and explain