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The Case of the Missing Veggie SticksStaving off my son's panic attacks.

By Emily Bazelon
Posted Thursday, May 15, 2008, at 1:20 PM ET

(Continued from page 1)

My first thought, admittedly drenched in guilt, was to somehow rearrange Eli's pickup so I could get to the park earlier. The on-time mother, swooping in to save the day. Then I decided that I was the one panicking. If I could just figure out how, the setup was ideal training ground for self-sufficiency, which I like to think I'm a big believer in. The school-to-soccer routine repeated, week to week. Most of it, he liked. I knew that he could handle getting food out of his backpack because every day at school, he hangs his bag on a hook, unzips it, takes out his lunchbox and water bottle, and sets them on a shelf. (Thank you, Montessori.) The trick was to translate that from school to park, without being there myself to coach him through it. I didn't want to involve another mom. I wanted to help Simon from afar. I wanted him to roll with the small injection of spontaneity and loose supervision that is also what he loves about soccer on Fridays.

I consulted Erica, and she counseled giving Simon a visual aide—a cue that he wouldn't be able to miss and that would remind him where his snack was and how to look for it. When her daughter started going places on her own and panicked over being left there, Erica would take off a bracelet (preferably one she didn't care that much about getting back) and give it to her daughter to hold. As it happens, there is a children's book about Erica's idea: The Kissing Hand, by Audrey Penn. The story follows Chester the raccoon, who is afraid to go to school for the first time. His mother kisses the center of his hand and tells him to hold his hand up to his face if he feels like he needs her. Absence made present. Sort of. Which for most kids is probably enough.

The Kissing Hand is a hit in kindergarten classrooms, to judge from the lesson plans it has generated. But it all seemed a little treacly and coo-ey, which meant that Simon wouldn't be likely to go for it, and just looking at the art projects and bad poems exhausted me. Plus, Chester's dilemma was slightly different than Simon's. Chester panics over missing his mother herself; Simon just missed me in my usual role of snack finder. Veggie sticks in hand, he would run back to the playground without looking back. The trick was to get him to lift himself over the moments in between. He needed to become his own smoother-outer, his own fixer.

So, here's the plan for soccer this week: On Friday morning, we're going to sit down, put the snack into his backpack together, and talk through the afternoon. I'm going to write a big red S on the back of Simon's hand. S for snack, S for Simon, S for See what you can do for yourself? I'll prompt him to issue his own instructions: What do you do when you get to the park? Where do you look? What do you do when you see the S? Maybe none of this will make any difference, and later in the day I'll find Simon purplish as usual. But we've got a few weeks of soccer on Fridays left in which to master solving a small problem on your own. Not to mention a lot of years of childhood.

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Emily Bazelon is a Slate senior editor.
Photograph of Trader Joe's Veggie Sticks courtesy Taquitos.net.
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