Try the rating method: Let’s see, on a scale of 1 to 20, how bad do you think this is? A 20? That’s for when your hair is on fire. Hmmm…I’ll gibe it a 5, which means you can be upset for 5 minutes. I’ll start timing now.
When 5 minutes are up: Okay, time to move on to other things. What would you like for dinner tonight?
Heh. OP have you tried overreacting yourself. OMG, let’s call an ambulance, grab the drip … get the doctor, call the president, mobilize the airforce etc. Seeing someone else overreact as a joke might let him get a grip on the absurdity of his reaction.
Is it possible he’s terrified by the sight of his own blood?
And you very likely can’t do any of this teaching while the kid is under the influence of adrenaline. When a lot of people are in full freak-out mode, they might as well have Alzheimers. This is part of what is behind the phenomena of people having very poor memory of auto accidents, even when they never lost consciousness.
I wouldn’t sweat this too much. I had two kids who went through this - very stoic to over reacting back to stoic (okay, one went back to reasonable instead of stoic. Now he just hops around and tries to decide if he’s allowed to swear in front of me).
I think as long as you remain calm, which it sounds like you are, and are matter of fact about dealing with the "injury"then I think it goes away on its own.
You know, tripping and falling down can be very embarrasing. Maybe he thinks that if he pretends to be really hurt, then people won´t laugh at him.
Yeah, I’ve done that, then he starts accusing me of not caring. And no, I really don’t give a hoot about his accusations personally. But it certainly isn’t having the effect I was hoping for.
I’m not a parent nor do I play one on TV.
Apparently my friends, when their daughter fell down or something, would be all like “Yay! You got up!! You’re not hurt!” and that made her not cry. One day the little girl (3 or so, I’m guessing) fell off a deck onto the concrete patio and hit her head HARD. The adults were all :eek: but she got up, rubbed her head, walked over to her uncle and said, “Uncle, am I bleeding?” and he said “No honey, you’re not bleeding.” So she went “Hmm. No harm no foul, there’s no crying in hockey.” …and toddled off.
Maybe making a fuss about NOT being injured might help?
My husband & I went for the absurd; it seems to tickle kids. Say one of our kids fell on the sidewalk. We’d go up to them & look them over, then say, “Did you break the sidewalk?” & look up and down at it, examine it for each little crack saying, “Is this where you hit? Could you have caused this one?” By then they were usually laughing & saying, “You’re weird.”
Also, we’d pretend not to understand them. “You just smelled a clown?” for You fell down, etc.
Also, whenever they were in a tussle with a sibling or friend (that got out of hand) we’d say, “You’ve got two minutes to work it out. After that you all have to kiss and make up.” That AWAYS worked.
At 8, I’d probably just tell him to shut up and quit being such a baby.
It’s almost certainly an attention thing- he knows you’ll come a-running, so he reacts like that.
I recall my younger brother having totally different reactions to minor injuries depending on whether it was me/dad/grandfathers or mom/grandmothers around to hear it. He’d suck it up around the men, and wail around the women because they’d give him attention.
Another vote for ignoring it. My best friend’s oldest was that way. He seemed to be having actual panic attacks about it and all the talking, breathing techniques, reassurances only seemed to make it worse. Because he was getting what he wanted…her complete attention.
Ignoring him was the only thing to do. She would sometimes have to tell other adults who were around not to rush to him and why she was ignoring him so they wouldn’t think she was just an awful mother. After that, it didn’t take long for him to snap out of it.
ETA: this kid did this from about 6 or 7 yo to around 10.
One thing you could try would be to take him out of the action for a long period of time under the guise of making sure it’s not too bad.
For example, he falls down while playing with friends and starts screaming. You come over and tell him it doesn’t look serious, but you can’t be sure because he’s screaming so much. You tell him to go to his room and lay quietly on his bed for 30 minutes so you can be sure it’s not something more serious. No reading, computer etc. because you want to make sure he’s not injured. I imagine he’ll get bored pretty quickly and want to rejoin the action. Do that a few times and he’ll learn not to overreact as much.
I always, always FREAK OUT when my 8 year old hurts himself. Only very minor injuries, of course; if he were obviously more seriously hurt, I wouldn’t do it. Anyway, knees scraps or a little cut or something and I am “OMG, ARE YOU OKAY??! SHOULD WE GO TO THE HOSPITAL?!” and then he looks at me like I’m crazy and says “Mo-om! It’s fine.”
I started doing that when he was four and screamed and cried forever over something that didn’t even bleed. It’s cut down remarkably on the drama and the day he fell down on a road so hard he had a tiny little pebble actually STUCK in his FACE (ooh, I’m going to post a link to a pic of this, even), he handled it very, very well and, when I didn’t freak out like I usually do, he looked right at me and said “I think it’ll be okay, Mom.” And I know it hurt like a bitch and I know he was scared. Good boy. The little red dot under his nose is where we dug the rock out.
It must be said, Silver Fire, that your little bruiser is adorable. 
Even with a face full of injury, lol…
Hey, thanks! His brother is pretty cute, too.
My kid is only two so this may be no help at all, but the two things that near-instantly stop her crying when she hurts herself are:
Explain what happened. Half the crying is because she doesn’t understand what just happened and why it hurts. ‘You were running and you caught your foot on this stuffed bear, and then you fell over and whacked your knee on this corner,’ and she calms down because now she gets what’s going on, so it’s not scary any more.
Remind her that it’ll go away. ‘Just wait a minute, and little by little, all the hurt will go out of your knee.’ She uses this one to calm herself down now - WHAP, whimper, pathetic quavering ‘Little by little, all the hurt will go away…’ and then back to playing. The immediacy of the pain, especially if it’s unexpected, can shock kids into forgetting that it’ll be gone in a second.
With my 8 year old, it’s not anxiety; it’s that she is offended that life is so unfair that she got hurt. As a 2 year old she used to give time-outs to furniture if she fell or bumped into them and hurt herself.
I’m hoping she outgrows it, but she hasn’t yet.
Maybe this sounds stupid, but teach him a couple of age-appropriate swear words? (Hamburgers!! for example or Fewmets! (Dragon Droppings)) The sillier the better! If he had a better outlet for hurt/frustration other than simply screaming/crying he may use it. Plus if they’re really silly (Hippopotamus Eyeballs!!) He may just laugh about it.
(This is just a suggestion, if it sounds too absurd to you, feel free to ignore it.)
My kids are a bit younger (5 and 2) but what we do with the minor stuff is smile brightly and say, “Oops! You’re ok. Give it a rub.” Obviously giving it a rub is perfectly useless, but it seems to give them some control over the situation, something to do for that split second or so while they decide whether to panic or not. We also do the silliness mentioned above (“Oh dear, did you break the sidewalk?”) and the extreme over-reaction (“Uh oh, that’s gonna bruise. We’d better amputate.”) but in your case where he’s flat-out freaking out, I think giving him a tool like counting, a silly swear, or giving it a rub would really help him learn how to cope.
I think you have to help him change his habit. Right now he has no control over his reaction. If you can manage to give him the same advice every single time, eventually he may stick that tool into his current routine of ouch-panic, turning it into ouch-count/rub/swear-panic, and maybe become ouch-count/rub/swear-move on. Hard to be around in every case, though, especially with a kid that old. Any way his other parents and even a trusted friend or two could be enlisted to join in the reminders? Coming from a buddy might be even more effective, “Ouch, man, I bet that hurt. Give 'er a rub and get back in the game!”