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Dealing with your child's fears and phobias
Extract taken from When Harry Hit Sally: Understanding Your Child's Behaviour, by Andrea Clifford-Poston
Children live on the cusp of their imagination and are consequently very aware of the 'what ifs' of life. For this reason, childrens' fears can seem bizarre to adults
Fears in the under-fives
Even the newest of babies will let their parents know when they feel frightened or at risk. When they feel you may let go of them, drop them, or that you are handling them in an unexpectedly careless way, their arms will jerk towards yours while their legs curve up instinctively like a little monkey searching for something or someone to clasp themselves around.
This so-called 'Moro response' is likely to be even more violent if you mis-time removing the security of your hands as you lay the baby in the cot or on the changing mat before they can feel the security of the mattress beneath them. At such times, the baby will even cry out in fear.
Older babies may be frightened by ordinary, everyday objects like a vacuum cleaner, hairdryer or having their hair washed. Others will play happily in the bath but be terrified of water gurgling down the plughole as the bath is emptied.
Parents may be bewildered, even irritated, by these irrational fears, but are unlikely to expect a baby to cope with them alone. You are more likely to take them seriously and comfort and reassure your baby. So it is interesting that as babies grow up there is a real risk of adults dismissing their fears as 'silly'.
Fear as a communication
Fears are a child's way of communicating to adults that there are things in their life that feel overwhelming, inexplicable or mysterious - you may well find yourself saying, 'Welcome to the human world!' Sometimes their fears seem quite irrational, such as the two-year-old who is terrified of feathers, and it is not uncommon for small children to be afraid of characteristics and aspects of people such as beards or even spectacles.
Such fears are often a toddler's way of getting to know strange and unfamiliar things in their world. They are a kind of self-protection, so the toddler is saying to the feather, if you like, 'You show me that you're harmless and then I'll accept you - until then I'll fear you.'
These fears are very different from those based on an experience where the child has realised that life can be risky and unexpected things can happen. An eight-year-old began to scream with terror when a leaking pipe caused a small cascade of water to flood down his classroom wall. He remembered the day when he was a toddler that his mother had left the bath running while she answered the phone. The water had poured down the staircase leaving him extremely frightened.
His fear was based on reality in that he had learned there was a risk of something happening which was not only threatening but also beyond his control. What he was not taking into account was that he was now six years older and so not nearly as helpless in the face of the unexpected.
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