About two years ago we met the Anxiety Dragon via the Duponts’ excellent book The Anxiety Cure for Kids. The Dragon had been dogging my youngest child Charlotte for quite a while at home as well as on trips to Disneyland. The whole story about how Charlotte fought the Dragon at Disneyland can be found here.
Our family had been looking forward to a trip to Walt Disney World for several years, and the main factor in the delay was the concern over Charlotte’s anxiety. We were not sure how she would react to brand new attractions and situations, so we decided to wait until we had the situation under control at our home park before we ventured to WDW.
After writing the original Anxiety Dragon article, I received a lot of feedback from readers who did not have the luxury of multiple visits to a Disney park to practice methods to defeat the Dragon. In some cases, they had one shot at an attraction, and that was it until next year’s visit. Living so near Disneyland, we were able to take our battle plan very slowly. Sometimes just walking through a queue or sitting near an attraction was all we would accomplish in a visit to the park. However, with only five days to see four parks and no plans for returning anytime soon, we had to be fairly confident that Char would do at least some of the attractions. We needed a revised game plan for facing the Dragon.
Long-Term Game Plan
The first part of our game plan began many months before we even got on a plane to Florida. We purchased the Unofficial Guide to Walt Disney World and gave Char a pack of sticky notes. My husband explained to Charlotte that she could read the book and mark attractions with a “yes,” “no,” or “no way in heck” sticky note. In doing this we were giving Char a feeling of control over her vacation, and the sticky notes let us know which attractions sounded frightening to her. Char spent hours with the Unofficial Guide marking pages. At first, she was a bit skittish at some of the terms used to describe an attraction. “Mom, it says that Peter Pan is a fast-loading attraction. Fast-loading!” However, once we explained what all the terms meant, the book was an invaluable resource for Charlotte.