ArcaMax

Sometimes, things went wrong. The girl afraid to sleep in her own bed took a city bus -- and missed her stop. She was so upset she actually talked to the stranger sitting next to her. That person told her to get off and walk two blocks back. She did it! And then?

"During the last week of treatment," Ortiz wrote, "unprompted," the girl "slept in her bed after never having made it through a night previously." And then she kept doing it.

As it turns out, some bloopers along the way work wonders, because they make the person more resourceful and flexible.

In the end, all the kids' anxiety went down. In psychological terms, it seems their confidence "generalized" from the new things they were doing to the things they'd been too scared to do. This mirrors a recent a study of people afraid of both heights and spiders. Treated for one, they became less afraid of the other.

If further studies of independence therapy show this kind of success -- Ortiz is seeking funding -- it could prove a valuable alternative to cognitive behavioral therapy for three reasons:

1. It seems to require fewer sessions, which makes it cheaper.

2. It doesn't require much training and could be done in schools.

3. It doesn't require the parents, kids or therapists themselves to deal with the unpleasant, triggering fear.

"This is a pretty big finding -- that you don't have to actually treat directly the thing someone is afraid of to make that thing better," says Ortiz. Simply put: Independence fights anxiety. "Or, as someone responded to my tweet, 'Something every Gen X person already knows.'"

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Lenore Skenazy is president of Let Grow, a contributing writer at Reason.com,and author of "Has the World Gone Skenazy?" To learn more about Lenore Skenazy (Lskenazy@yahoo.com) and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

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