Stop Doing *This* When Your Child Is Fearful, Say Experts

My nine-year-old daughter struggles with fear rather frequently in a wide variety of situations. Sometimes it’s rational—it struck me as totally normal that she was fearful during her first ever indoor rock-climbing experience, and after having been in a serious car accident together, I totally understand why she’s an anxious passenger. Other times, it doesn’t seem so rational to me. (It took me several years to convince her that Clorox wipes aren’t the kind of toxic that will kill you as long as you’re not actually ingesting them for lunch.)

If you have a fearful or anxious kid, you might be wondering how to respond to these big feelings. I know my own responses have run the gamut from snuggles and sympathy to downright irritation to the tune of get over it already! Then, Editor-in-Chief Jillian Quint, turned me onto a useful parenting guide she found at the local library: How to Talk to Kids About Anything: Tips, Scripts, Stories and Steps to Make Even the Toughest Conversations Easier, Robyn Silverman, PhD. And as luck would have it, the book contained some pretty sound advice on how to manage your child’s fears.

I was unsurprised to learn that getting irritated with my daughter when she experiences fears I can’t relate to isn’t the ideal response. Dismissiveness is unhelpful—namely because fear is a normal and a helpful response to dangerous stimuli, and one that’s more likely to occur in young children who are still getting used to the world around them, says Dr. Silverman. Nevertheless, fear is an uncomfortable emotion and it’s easy to feel that impulse to stomp it out when you see your child going through it.

One thing to remember: fear is a normal response to a real threat, while anxiety is a nervous response to a perceived threat. My daughter suffers from the latter, and Dr. Silverman describes this anxious tendency as being “fueled by what-if thinking that can trigger a fear response or false alarm, even though the danger isn’t actually present.” Whether it’s true fear (you know, the helpful kind that stops you from walking in front of ongoing traffic) or anxiety over little things like Clorox wipes, the expert recommends that you praise and normalize the fearful feeling. 

How do you normalize fear, you ask? Well, chances are you have a few of your own. Next time your kid has big, fearful feelings, she recommends that you, well, empathize. I might not understand my daughter’s anxiety in elevators—I’m tired and find them quite convenient—but most people find it hard to understand my arachnophobia, which is a true phobia that manifests with true hysteria. Per Dr. Silverman, it’s advisable to share the ways in which you can relate, whether it’s something you currently fear or something you feared as a child, like thunderstorms or the dark.

And when it comes to my daughter’s first rock climbing experience and the anxiety she initially felt, Dr. Silverman’s sound advice is to change the goal by instilling confidence in your child. Per the book, a simple script might read something like, “I know this is scary for you, but I truly feel confident and certain that you can do hard things. You might feel scared, but you can be brave.”

Let’s just say this will be my own mantra the next time I encounter a spider.