dealing with scared kids

This is a posting that I just sent to my mom's group in response to a mom saying that her 5/6 year old was scared to be alone just now. IMHO being scared must be brain-related. I'll bet that some growingis going on, and who on earth knows what it does to the brain. Thatsaid, everyone in the world needs to grow the skills to take care ofthemselves and calm themselves.IMHO we don't have enough rituals in our life. You might want toread a book called "The spirit catches you and you fall down." This is a book about pre-literate people (the Hmong) livingthe the USA, and the problems in communication that arise when oneof the little Hmong girls has uncontrollable seizures (seen,incidentally, as connections to God by the Hmong), and American doctors try to communicate with her family and community. It was perceived(after the fact) that the best way to have communicated howto take care of the girl would have been to have gone to the Hmong community and staged a big, atavistic parade. Interesting stuff and it's remained in my brain as an interesting perspective when dealingwith our own pre-literates. I strongly believe that many children have their own "magicalobjects" which help them through hard times. I sent a friend's boys stone bears, I think, when they lost their mother. And stone boxes to put the bears in. Some wierd thing from California's new-age stores, along with a story about it, in hopes that it would helpthem get through the loss of one of their mothers. Did it help at all? Who knows. While you can only push this stuff if you "live" it (e.g. ask a greek orthodox or catholic if they can remember the rituals of their church - very powerful stuff), many people who do not ascribe to organized religions are constructing and using their own rituals to deal with the world.I have posted before on a book called "Starbright."here's the page on my website that deals with it, storytelling, andso forth. While some fundamentalist Christian groups have lambasted this book,IMHO it is a proven fact that visualization is a way in which we can communicate with ourselves and learn to psych ourselves up, calm ourselves down, etc. Books like this are a way to teach your childto have an internal dialogue with themselves, to learn to guide where their dreams go, and so forth. IMHO not a lot different than an athlete imagining swimming really fast, for example. There is another book that I'd recommend a LOT. It's called "CircleRound", and you can use this book as you'd like. IMHO it's got a lotof "hard to swallow cockamamie touchie feely" stuff in it, but still, it gives you real examples of rituals and might help you to create your own. (Whether or not you want to do it around the characters of Cerridwen, Morda, and Gwion, for example) But it's a VERY well-rounded book and I'll bet you can get it used on Amazon.What *I* would do is start talking about American Indians. Find a really neat book about them or some type of Usborne thing about them and gradually lead it towards how they were nomadic and very brave,and how they took animals as their protectors (a specific animal)and had a secret name, and ... oh, all sorts of stuff. Then, oh*wow!* we can have an Indian naming ceremony/blessing ceremony/whatever for our new house/whatever. I like that approach because it gives the child a context. I thought that the indian stuff was totally way cool when I was about 6 - somany neat and interesting things. They made everything! At any rate, a form of spiritualism which is, to the best of my knowledge,based upon strong respect for the world and things within it is ..well, nice and boy-like, imho. The "fairy-" like aspects of some of the other stuff is very hard, imho, to focus boys on. I'm looking through "Circle Round" right now and they actually havea ritual called "No longer a baby, not yet a teen: a ritual forcoming into childhood." They talk about how they researched this,talking with a friend from Senegal who told them that, in hiscountry, they had a ritual at age 6, welcoming them as members ofthe village and imbuing them with new responsibilities. They wantedto balance education and celebration. It goes on for abotu 8pages. They constructed special necklaces for the boys and the boysloved them. But they also had a big ritual about it. Among otherthings, they drew with body paints on the kids, using symbols. Atree for the spine, speed of lightening on their legs. etc.