Learning To Relax

Quiet Your Thoughts and Calm Down

ISBN: 978-1-7923-8505-6
By: Wills, Fred

ABOUT THE BOOK

cvLearning To Relax; Quiet Your Thoughts and Calm Down, is the seventh in a series of fun rhyming books focused on serious subjects geared to help children learn new ways to work together and feel good about themselves. The series provides a roadmap to self-awareness that utilizes social and emotional learning techniques in order to help guide children along the way. Anxiety can terrorize and immobilize a child and too often seen as exaggerated and illogical. However, the child who experiences this anxiety it is very real and they cannot hide nor can they avoid acting out their fears. These intense feelings can be overwhelming and unbearable. Not only does Learning To Relax present others with ways to identify and predict stress, but it provides simple lessons on how to handle them. We have developed some easy strategies to plan and predict these stressors and subsequently help children to learn how to plot a course that bypasses the extremes. This approach reinforces the belief that almost always there are ways to experiences relief in small simple ways that ultimately help people feel good about themselves. Too often the child who struggles with anxiety, also experiences poor self-esteem and a paralyzing distress that interferes with school and with family. A child can become preoccupied with their fears and problems, stuck in that mindset that is often too hard and seemingly impossible to escape. These thoughts are often reinforced and acted out in a learning environment leading to increasing anxiety with anger and poor self-esteem with depression. Frequently after realizing you are not alone with the development a simple plan to identify stress helps a child to learn new skills that can help break the vicious cycle can be life changing. An improved sense of self worth frequently leads to improved social engagement and a decrease in a negative preoccupation with one’s unique demoralizing difficulties. Feeling nervous, uncomfortable and isolated from your community is difficult for anyone to overcome. A preoccupation with fears and anxiety will always interfere with a child’s learning, coping and ultimately happiness. Simple plans and viable options with peer and adult support are key in securing successful results. These positive feelings guarantee that children will find new and better ways to solve problems, get things done and ultimately feel good about who they are. Learning To Relax, helps children look at themselves as not alone, but as integral parts of larger communities. That picture begins to seem not as scary or as unobtainable as their once pessimisitic thoughts used to view the world. Words cannot express the transformation that occurs when a child stops the vicious cycle anxiety produces and they begin to step out from inside their clench fisted and isolated world to find a caring and a less intimidating world. All children deserve to feel safe, but it requires nonintimidating support and guidance.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Fred Wills

Fred Wills is a self trained artist and illustrator who has created both personal and commercial artwork on a broad range of topics and in a variety of media. Fred’s insight and personal touch has its roots from his lengthy and successful career as a registered nurse for over 40 years. Fred’s life mission has centered on helping and caring for persons who often feel different and outcast. As a nurse, Fred has worked extensively with acquired brain injury clients, the developmentally challenged and persons with serious and persistent mental illness. Whether in a hospital setting or a home, Fred has held the hands of family members, comforted those in despair and taught new ways of coping to those who are anxious and afraid. Working with people in emotional pain across many spectrums has allowed Fred to acquire the knowledge that we all share so much in common and differ so very little. Fred’s unique perspective, sense of humor and gift as an illustrator prompt him to raise delicate questions and create provocative works of art. Growing up in a large family and being himself a father of five, Fred feels he has been provided with an abundance of hilarious material. Daily cartoons for his children about family life and growing up are often found plastered across the refrigerator door. These cartoons continue to motivate his family as they take on the world. In 1999, Fred and his wife Debi were blessed with the birth of their youngest child, Jessica May Wills. Jessica was born with Down Syndrome. After this life changing event Fred began to focus his special perspective on the development of a specific cartoon character, Just Jessica. The inspiration to create this character came from a simple comment his daughter made, “I want to be known as just Jessica, not Jessica with Down Syndrome, just Jessica!” The character Just Jessica was born and the journey began. Fred’s message is simple. In the series entitled Just Jessica’s Life Lessons, he deals with the social and emotional components of a child’s emotional and educational maturation. Written with the consultation of his daughter Melissa Wills, MS, an elementary school special education teacher, the goal is to help children explore those things they might otherwise avoid and make them feel uncomfortable. Just Jessica’s unique perspective will help children, with the guidance of parents and teachers, to identify and explore new healthy ways to deal with difficult situations and the corresponding strong emotions. Throughout, the series focuses on how much we share in common and that we are all more alike than different. It is our hope that these stories will help guide children to look deep inside themselves and find a place where they feel more comfortable, allowing them to function better and more competently. Ultimately, children will laugh and discover new ways to boost their self esteem. Fred combines the wit, sassiness and common sense of his daughter with humorous rhyming to help us realize, special needs or not, we are all “a lot alike and only a little different.”