"It's
all-inclusive," said Debby Higgins, SPED PAC Coordinator. "It affects
children right on to adults, so we wanted everyone to know about it."

The
lecture, co-sponsored by the Special Education Parent Advisory Council
(SPED PAC) and Somerville Community Partnership for Children (SCPC),
was open to the community.

A Cambridge mother, who prefers not
to be identified, came to understand her teenage daughter's anxiety
condition, and to determine whether a CBT approach had anything new to
offer her.

"It clarified some things," she said. Her companion,
a mother with her own anxiety issues, hoped that a CBT approach might
help alleviate her child's depression.

Argenziano, Kennedy,
Capuano elementary schools, Somerville HeadStart, and Somerville High
School were represented at the event – but the lecture attracted
parents, childcare providers, and anxious adults from Medford,
Cambridge, Winchester, Norfolk, and Malden as well.

Rasmi
Abdelrazzaq, a care provider at the Roberts AfterSchool Program, has
seen a change in children's' anxiety levels over the course of her 19
years as a preschool teacher. "It has changed. They don't like to wait,
they're always moving, always nervous," she said.

Tricia
Kennedy, Director of the Somerville Childcare Center, deals most
frequently with separation anxiety. Kennedy and her staff have already
developed several techniques to cope with this – they encourage
children to carry around pictures of their families in plastic sandwich
bags and construct albums, or have parents leave a scarf or token with
the child, to prove that they will return.

Brown discussed
general anxiety disorder, specific phobia, social phobia,
post-traumatic stress disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, panic
disorder, separation anxiety, and school refusal.

"CBT is an
effective way to change your brain," said Brown, who specializes in
performance psychology and whose book, The Winner's Brain, is
forthcoming in April. "It's a way to maximize what your brain is
capable of doing."

This event is the foundation of a "Parents as
Partners" initiative, sponsored by the Somerville Public Schools in
collaboration with SPED and SCAC, according to SCAC Director Nomi
Davidson.

A workshop on bullying, set for March 10, is next in the series.