Miracles Move Me

BY  HELENA NEGRU Quick Summary 1. An “empathy first” approach 2. Avoid making your child feel like a problem to be fixed 3. Consider using play to help your child understand his anxiety 4. Teach your child how to centre himself in reality 5. Allow your child to worry 6. Affirm the importance of remaining in the present moment 7. Help your child take “baby steps” in order to overcome fearful situations 8. Have your child create a “calm down” checklist 9. Don’t blame yourself for your child’s anxiety Parents want nothing more than to see childhood remain a time of carefree wonder and joy for their children, an age of innocence wherein the troubles of the wider world are kept at a safe distance by caring adult oversight. As such, the parents who have anxious children are faced with a difficult dilemma: How do they protect their children from the multitude of relatively “normal” activities (e.g. going to school, socializing with friends) that provoke anxie

By TRAVIS BRADBERRY Emotional manipulators defy logic. They derive satisfaction from controlling you and creating chaos. We all know what it feels like to be emotionally manipulated. It can be extremely effective, which is why some unscrupulous individuals do it so much. A few years ago, Facebook, in conjunction with researchers from Cornell and the University of California, conducted an experiment in which they intentionally played with the emotions of 689,000 users by manipulating their feeds so that some users only saw negative stories while others only saw positive stories. Sure enough, when these people posted their own updates, they were greatly influenced by the mood of the posts they’d been shown. Facebook caught a lot of flak over the experiment, primarily because none of the “participants” gave their consent to join the study. Perhaps more frightening than Facebook’s faux pas was just how easily people’s emotions were manipulated. After all, if Facebook can mani