So our next question is about a 14-year-old boy. This young man is complaining of being sick and throwing up, and he doesn't want to go to school, and doctors can find nothing wrong.
There are times where individuals feel stressed and their body feels physically ill. My guess is the feedback that this parent is probably getting is it's probably anxiety or stress related. And what do we do with that? And that's not uncommon, right?
So, a couple of things that I might try with my child, and there are two here. One is teaching my child how to regulate difficult emotions. Like I mentioned earlier, the safe and sound protocol so they can learn to regulate their body. Because throwing up is probably the body's way of saying I feel stressed, and I don't think they're making it up. I think their body truly is stressed.
The other part of it is getting them to talk about their fears. This is a really critical part—to lean into your child's fear. What are they afraid of? What's the worst-case scenario? What's their fear as they think about going to school? Because the fear might be triggering our autonomic nervous system's fight or flight response. In other words, I don't feel safe. That's really the message of throwing up. It's our body's way of saying, you don't need this food because you're under attack or you don't feel safe.
A really basic concept is when we feel safe, we relax, we digest food, we're calmer. When we feel stressed, when we feel worried, that's why I asked you about identifying your child's biggest fear, because if you can identify the fear and they can give a voice to it, now listening to the fear is really important. But the next phase is also important because what we don't want to say is, "Well, you shouldn't be worried about that." Alternatively, we could say something like, "Tell me more about that fear. Walk through that with me." And so now we're just going through this, and I'm actually not afraid to talk with them through this situation.
I'll give you an example. I've shared the story previously, so if you're on with this again tonight, thanks, you might get a rerun of this one. But it was a situation with my daughter. My wife and daughter were going to our church to meet their new class. My daughter was going into a new Sunday school class and my wife was going to be teaching a class, but it wasn't my daughter's class, it was the age younger or actually a little bit younger than my daughter.
And so my daughter, I say, "Hey, it's time to get ready to go." My wife’s in the kitchen doing something, and my daughter says, "I'm not going." About that time, my wife walks in and she says, "Why are you not gonna go?" And my daughter says, "Because I'm afraid"—listen to the language—"I'm afraid that none of my friends will like you as a teacher."
Fear that my friends won't like you, my mom. And I'm anxious about that, afraid of that. Now, my wife being wise, she said to my daughter, "Remember when we did Joy School? If you're familiar with Joy School, it's preschool, and it's got a curriculum and moms do it amongst themselves." And so my wife had done that, and she said, "Really simply, remember when we did Joy School together? Did your friends like me then?" And my daughter said, "Oh yeah, that was a lot of fun," and that's all it took. My daughter said, "Oh, okay, mom, let's go."
Because the fear was preventing her from going to this place that she felt like her friends would reject her mother. Sometimes it's that simple. With younger children, it gets more complex with teenagers, and heaven forbid, how many fear-based experiences do we have as adults? But sometimes breaking it down helps us understand our fears.
Long answer to your question about your child getting sick, but my point is, when our children, when we all feel safe, we relax, our body relaxes, and we are much more likely to be able to go face our fears. But we need strategies, we need solutions—calming the body and helping your child have a positive experience.
Ideally, your child would have a friend to be there with them. I would incorporate social interaction. So if they've got a friend, maybe it's carpooling, something that gets them to this place where they have security and feel safer. I might talk with the school, the administrators, the school counselor. If my child feels anxious, can they go to a safe place where that anxiousness can subside to help them deal with the rest of the day?
I would also assess for things that might be creating the fear, the concern, and I would want to see if they would open up and share that with me. So that's where I would start in this kind of a situation. There's a lot more information that I would want to gather. Like again, it's not just the fear, but what's happening? Are they feeling those same things at school? Those are the types of questions I would want to inquire about.