Quotes from Sissy Goff

I'll tell you exactly what my daughter told me: "I realized I'm more brave than I am afraid.

Girls who worry are not only some of the smartest kids I meet, they're also some of the kindest. The most thoughtful. The most compliant.

Anxiety doesn't have a memory, remember? So believing she was going to learn from that mistake was just me falling into the trap of avoidance as well. She regretfully stayed home, and the safety she felt was stronger than her regret. The Worry Monster just flexed his muscle that much more.

Courage with fear is wisdom; courage without fear is destructiveness

How can you develop more flexibility as a family, especially with an anxious daughter? First, it can be helpful to practice in the safety of your own home. Change seats at the dinner table. Serve breakfast for dinner. Make beds with the pillows in the opposite direction. Mix up the bedtime routine or which one of you wakes the kids in the morning. Little changes can have a big impact on your daughter learning flexibility.

But when you have more emotion over something in her life than she does, she typically either shuts down or simply stops talking to you about it. Worry operates under the same idea. You can't work harder than she does to defeat her Worry Monster.

Scientists have observed that our brains get better at whatever they practice. This phenomenon is called neuroplasticity. So at this point, however old she is, she's likely mastered the art of the worry brain. Instead, we want her to develop mastery over using her thinking brain to "boss back" the worries.5

The more she uses her voice to boss the Worry Monster back, the more she, in turn, builds up that voice, as well as her confidence and the neuroplasticity in her strong, smart brain.

the ones who've done their own emotional work are best equipped to support their kids emotionally.

We begin with teaching kids feeling words (Vocabulary), that lead to statements like, "I feel sad that my sister won't play with me." These statements then lead to actions (Resourcefulness), or taking the emotion to something constructive. These are the foundational building blocks of emotional development.

We need to help them express those feelings so that they don't all spill out as worry.

When your daughter has a little help, a lot of empowerment, and a foundational faith, worries don't have to carry the same power in her life. With God's help, I really believe you can raise a worry-free girl. As The Message paraphrase of Matthew 11:28–30 says,

Anxiety is a method of seeking two experiences: certainty and comfort. The problem is that it wants these two outcomes immediately and continually," according to Reid Wilson and Lynn Lyons, the authors of Anxious Kids, Anxious Parents.8 To give children the certainty and comfort they're seeking requires that we rescue them from scary situations. And every time we rescue, we perpetuate the belief that they need to be rescued. It also makes them more demanding the next time.

We truly are fearfully and wonderfully made. But sometimes our brains operate on false alarms.

We would venture to say that the opposite of fear is not a lack of fear but trust. Somewhere deep down all of us know we're powerless to change things or truly protect children the way we long to. But we don't want to parent out of fear. When we do, the emphasis is more on preventing than on encouraging. It becomes more about control than it does relationship. It centers on what is wrong in the world rather than who you and your child can be in the midst of it.

A healthy mind platter includes: focus time, play time, connecting time, physical time, time in, down time, and sleep time.

He has several tactics he uses most often in his attacks on her mind: exaggerated likelihood, catastrophic thinking, underestimated ability, faulty memory, and perpetual questions. Worry has no memory and assumes the worst