Sophia loves gymnastics, so it came as quite a surprise when
she freaked out at the prospect of moving up from “Tiny Tumblers” to
“Beginners.” I naturally assumed she’d
be thrilled to join the bigger girls, be able to do more. Instead, she burst into tears.
“I don’t want to,” she objected on the way from the gym to
the car.
“Please don’t make me,” she begged, shaking in her booster
seat.
“I just want to stay in Tiny Tumblers!” she wailed, her
tears real and heavy, rolling down her face.
I had hoped that, perhaps, with some time to think about it,
she’d get used to the idea. But no,
every morning, when she woke up, as if she had been wrestling with the idea all
night long, she’d sob, “I don’t want to be in Beginners.”
Would it be cruel to make her do this thing she feared so
much?
I wrestled with it too.
On the one hand, it seemed to be an irrational fear. Like I said, she loves gymnastics. She bounces with excitement the whole time
she’s there, a grin stretched out on her face as she does c-drops on the
trampoline, swings from the lowest of the uneven bars, walks with great poise
across the balance beam and cartwheels through an obstacle course. On the other, do I really need to push her to
do any activity at her age? There’s time, right?
But here’s what I know about fear. Avoidance of the feared thing validates the
fear. It feeds the fear, and the fear
grows. What starts out as a pang, soon
looms large as an impossibility.
Facing our fears, a little bit at a time, is the only way to
overcome them. In cognitive behavioral
therapy, this is known as exposure. You
create a hierarchy of various gradations of the feared thing and gradually
expose yourself to them over time. Since
fear is anticipatory, once you see you can handle lesser versions, you gain
confidence, and eventually mastery over your fear. So, in this case, it might be that Sophie
starts by observing the Beginners class with me at her side, praising her for this
first step. Next time she watches for a
while and then joins them for a short period of time, maybe just one activity,
still with me in the room giving her the thumbs up. Then she might stay for increasingly longer
periods of time in my smiling and winking presence. Finally, I would begin to fade myself out,
moving from inside the gym to the observation room where the parents gather to
watch their children, mouthing “Good job, Soph!” from behind the plate glass
windows.
Any suggestion of this to Sophia, however, instantly brought
on a spate of tears.
I shared my concerns with the gymnastics staff. They let me know who her new teacher would
be. Fortunately, it was the same
dynamic, fun, energetic teacher who had orchestrated her recent birthday party
at the gym, Mr. D.
“Would you like for him to talk to Sophie?” the woman at the
desk asked me, the week before we were due to make the switch.
“Yes! Please!” I
replied, a little too loudly.
“Not a problem. We
don’t want little Miss Sophie to be so upset!”
And so, that week, the last week of Tiny Tumblers with Miss
Heather and all of Sophie’s tiny, tumbling friends, Mr. D called Sophie
aside. I watched from the observation
room. He was smiling. She nodded a few times.
When class was over, I told her I saw her talking to Mr. D.
“What did he say to you?”
“He asked me if I wanted to be in his class.”
“What did you say to him.”
“I said ‘maybe.’”
Well, this was progress.
I placed a moratorium on any discussion of gymnastics. There seemed to be no sense in stirring her
up further.
The following week, on the appointed day, I picked Sophie up
from school. As we made our way to the
car, it dawned on her where we were going.
“I don’t want to go to gymnastics! Please just take me home!” I felt a physical pain in my heart.
“Soph, I know you can do this. I know you can be brave. And you’ll see—Beginners is just like Tiny
Tumblers, only you’ll be with kids your own age and you’ll get to do more cool
stuff.”
“I don’t want to do more stuff. I want to do what I was doing.”
“I know, hon. But you’re getting to be a big girl. Tiny Tumblers is for 3-5 year olds. You’re six now. And they told me that you’re ready. I promise,
I wouldn’t make you do anything that you weren’t ready for. “
Nothing but sniffling in the back seat.
“You know what I think?”
“What?”
“I think that people who are brave should be rewarded.” I glanced in the rearview mirror, a wry smile
on my face. It was time to bring out the
big guns: Bribery.
“Rewarded?” Sophie
was smiling too, in spite of herself.
“Yeah. Like in
stories, heroes are always rewarded for their bravery. I think it would be a brave thing for you to
try out Beginners today. Do you know
what being brave means?”
“Yes. It means doing
something you think you can’t do.”
“Yes, that and something that you are afraid to do. It’s about standing up to your fear.”
Sophie nodded, digesting this.
“So what kind of a reward do you think you should get for
doing something you are afraid to do and think you can’t do.”
“I don’t know, mom.
You tell me.” Sophie is often
unable to choose, when faced with the prospect of getting something special.
“How about we go out for ice cream?”
“Can I get a topping?” She ups the ante.
“Sure.”
“Any topping I want?”
“Yes. Any topping you
want.”
“Okay, mom. I’ll do
my best to be brave.”
We arrived at the gym and Sophie quickly changed in the
bathroom. As she did, she told me about
a dream she had had:
“We were warming up in gymnastics. Miss Heather took one of my arms, and Mr. D
took the other. Like they were playing
tug of war. And they pulled at me until
my arms came off and I couldn’t go on the bars anymore!”
My poor, poor baby. I
hated to watch her go through this. “You’re
going to be fine, Soph. Be brave!” I gave her a hug.
Once inside the gym, I was informed by a man with a list
that Sophie was going to be in Miss Ricky’s class, not Mr. D’s. Why this switch was made, given the
circumstances, was beyond me. But I
decided not to let Sophie see me sweat.
“Okay,” I said brightly, “Sophie is a little nervous about
moving up to beginners.”
“A lot of kids feel that way,” said the man with the
list.
“Okay, if I bring her over?”
“Sure. And if you
need to stay for a bit, that’s cool.”
I walked Sophie over to Miss Ricky and was thrilled to see
that one of Sophie’s friends from nursery school was in the class. Sophie, wrapped herself around one of my legs
and began to cry. The teacher helped pry
her off.
“This is Sophie,” I said.
“Hi Sophie,” said Miss Ricky.
“Who are all of you?” I asked the girls. Each one said their name, and Sophie’s little
friend grabbed her by the hand.
“Sophie! We’re doing cartwheels,”
she began to explain.
I took this as my opportunity to back up a few steps. Sophie continued to sniffle, but she allowed
me to walk away. “I’m going to be right
over there.” I said, pointing to the wall.
I stood by the wall and watched flashing smiles and thumbs up, each time
she looked my way. The third time, she
gave me a thumbs up back.
After twenty minutes, she was fully engaged, smiling,
laughing, bouncing just as she always had.
I pantomimed that I was going to go up to the observation room.
Sophie nodded.
From the room, I watched as for the first time, the teacher
let them use the chalk before they pull themselves up onto the uneven
bars. Sophie carefully covered every bit
of her hands until they were bright white.
She held them up to the window to show me.
After class, I asked her how Beginners was.
“Awesome!” Sophie declared, “Can we come every
Wednesday?”
We had a lovely evening that night. Eating our ice-creams and pretending to be
sharks. Two days later, we were in the
kitchen, making pancakes for breakfast together. Sophie pull a magnet off the
refrigerator.
“Mom! This is what I
did about gymnastics!”
The magnet had a quote on it from Eleanor Roosevelt. The quote had gotten me through a difficult
period in my life, when I fought to overcome my shyness and was learning to
facilitate trainings of large groups of people.
It is something that I now do with relative ease. In fact, I had done three just this week.
The magnet reads,
You must do the thing
you think you cannot do.
