Big Magic: helping kids cope with anxiety and grief

Posted on 29 April, 2019

I recently had a week in Sydney while my 18-year-old daughter was there for a work course.

It was the week after my eight-year-old son had attended Camp Magic at Birrigai — a camp for children aged 7-17 who have lost a parent or sibling.

We left straight from the camp to drive to Sydney for the course. On the way, my little boy reassured us that he was equipped with his ‘Resilience Action Plan’ from the camp, should anyone in Sydney require it. My daughter has quite serious anxiety, mainly while away from home, even if I am there. As the week progressed, her struggle with panic attacks increased exponentially. It was physically and emotionally debilitating.

It’s heart-wrenching to watch your child struggle with something you yourself do not regularly experience. Sometimes it feels as though there’s a limit to the things I can do to help her. We go for walks, I remind her to change her breathing the way the psychologist showed her, I ‘talk her down’, she’s on medication … but she continues to feel sick and fears vomiting (which is how her anxiety presents).

Enter the eight-year-old, fresh from grief camp:

He dived into the ‘calm box’ he’d put together over the weekend and pulled out a paddle-pop stick, upon which he’d drawn the numbers one through ten.

“If one is fine and 10 is terrible, where are your emotions right now?” he said. “If it’s under seven, you can find ways to help yourself. If it’s over seven, you need to ask for help.”

She pointed at 10.

“Okay, put your hand on your heart and take two big, slow breaths.” He did this too, and counted her through it.

Then he found the stress ball they’d made at camp, and handed that over, and opened a ‘note’ on the iPad to write up his “clinical notes”.

“Not sick,” he wrote. “Having a panic attack.”

He sat with her on the bed, and talked her through a guided meditation of his own invention while playing relaxing music from YouTube.

Calmly, he reassured her she was okay and it would be all right, which it inevitably was, the closer we were to coming home. She passed the course with flying colours and the teacher told me later they’d had no idea she was having panic attacks all the way through.

On the way home in the car, I asked if she’d mind if I wrote this article. She said, “Of course. I don’t care who knows I’ve got anxiety. Lots of people have it. The more people who talk about it, the better.”

I’d been on a promise to write something about Camp Magic for a few months now, and hadn’t quite found the right ‘hook’. But to watch my little boy apply the resilience techniques he’d been shown was like watching some sort of magic unfold.

The Sydney-based camp is expanding into rural NSW, Canberra and Victoria, with plans to grow national. It is an extraordinary mix of good fun, deep sharing about loss, and learning practical strategies. When it launched for the first time in Canberra in April, places on the camp filled up within weeks. Organisers had to turn away more than 30 grieving Canberra children who have lost a parent or sibling.

One of my best friends volunteered at the camp as a mentor. She’d lost her dad to cancer while we were in Year 12 — in fact, weeks before our then ‘ASAT’ writing task, on the topic of euthanasia. She’s convinced her life might have panned out very differently if Camp Magic had existed back then.

To bring the camp to Canberra again in 2020, and to help the additional 30 children who missed out this year (and the extra children who sadly don’t even know yet that they will be grieving a parent or a sibling as this year progresses), we need Canberra to get behind it. Sponsorship from Canberra businesses would make an enormous difference.

I’ve watched how the trained psychologists and educators at the camp take children who are emotionally fragile and grief-stricken and empower them not only to understand and respond to their grief in a very real and unfiltered way, but to believe in a future where they can thrive — not ‘despite’ what they’ve been through, but because of it. The deep awareness and empathy that these kids are developing is something for which this world is crying out. Sometimes it’s young people who’ve been through the most who lead the way.

You can find out more about Camp Magic here, and if you feel you can offer financial support or would like to become a corporate partner, here’s a page with information and contact details. The organisers are also in need of more volunteer mentors. This is an opportunity to be partnered with one child for the whole weekend, and help them through the whole experience.

This experience is lighting our family’s path through childhood grief. I don’t know where we would be without it. The grieving kids of Canberra need our help.