Answers from the Advice Goddess
	Primal fears

Query: My kids are young and spooked by all the attention given to possible emergency situations at school and in the media. What can I do? They’re losing sleep, and so am I.

–Jittery on Jackson

Carrie: You can decide to make your home a media free zone. After you’ve dusted off your Y2K emergency preparedness supplies, shown their locations and shared their functions, you can quietly cease to bring the topic of the war up in conversation within hearing of the children. You can choose not to listen to or watch the news when or where the kids may be able to listen in. Don’t avoid the subject if your children bring it up. Answer the questions you can, then move the conversation along. Your kids count on you to provide them with security in more ways than the physical. Your ability to model a life not consumed by fear and anxiety will go a longer way with them than any other single thing you can do to provide them with reassurance.

If the notion of building a media firewall to create a sense of safety for your children doesn’t seem realistic, consider balancing their media awareness by finding another ongoing news thread with a positive spin. If possible, try to track down a story with local roots. It’s interesting to and fun for children to recognize that places they know, businesses they frequent and people they may have met also constitute "news."

Encourage your family to learn how to wage peace together as another alternative to the pervasive atmosphere of impending doom. Volunteer activities aimed at countering poverty and ignorance, faith groups and their vigils, inspirational readings from the works of the great pacifists of the twentieth century and earlier are all constructive responses to the widespread hopelessness and helplessness engendered by our national act of violence.

Query: Mother’s house is filled with three and half decades of not being able to throw anything away. She won’t move to a small, convenient apartment in one of those senior communities–largely because she can’t, or won’t, figure out how to work through the ungodly amount of stuff she’s been accumulating since before the Nixon administration.

–Worried on Wildwood

Carrie: I hope your mom lives nearby. It will be easier for you and her to pick out a good, professional organizing company to come in and help you all thin down your mother’s possessions. This process can take a fair amount of time. You’ll have to know how you want to dispose of things (give to friends or family, send to a thrift shop, sell at auction or yard sale, store for long term, send to dump or take along to the new apartment), or at least classes of things, before the professionals can do their job.

If your mom has clinical collector’s syndrome, you won’t be able to start the physical process until you arrange for her to be diagnosed and her treatment plan begins to take effect. This can require a number of visits to medical specialists, ongoing therapy and one or more prescriptions. Expect to spend several months getting your mom’s meta-relationship to her belongings sorted out. It’s a tedious undertaking, but you may be able to work with your mom to help free her of her overwhelming pile of stuff–forever!

Query: The neighbors have a new puppy. Apparently they forgot to get a manual on how to raise it. It cries all the time. I work at home, and I have to listen to it all day long, and well into the night sometimes. Do I have to put up with this?

–Irritated on Albany

Carrie: Dogs are tribal animals by nature. Their psychology evolved around groups, group contact and group activities. All dogs dislike being isolated, and puppies aren’t easy to condition to accept solitude. Most of them take a few months to get used to the patterns of their human pack. Once the puppy understands the schedule, it will generally take to sleeping through those parts of the day when the rest of the tribe is unavailable.

However, your neighbors’ puppy may indeed be subjected to inadequate care. And either way, you have the right to work in peace. Call the non-emergency police department number and file a complaint. A community affairs officer will address the situation promptly, and even pass the case to the Humane Society if it seems that the puppy’s well being is at risk. It may take more than one complaint over a series of weeks for the noise to abate completely. Try to extend compassion to your neighbors. It’s harder to break a dog of a bad habit and retrain a positive behavior than it is to give it sound training the first time around.

Got a question? Carrie's got an answer.
Send your queries to Carrie Megginson
c/o The Voice
P.O. Box 11262, Takoma Park, MD 20913