Children live on the brink of their imagination and consequently are very aware of the 'what ifs' of life, which are always idiosyncratic.
A seven-year-old boy was terrified of going into the sea even though he was a good swimmer and fearless at the swimming pool. He turned out not to be afraid of the waves, as the adults had guessed, but that if he went '...
too far out on accident, I might sink in the sand to Australia'.
Children's fears can seem bizarre to adults. And while those of small children tend to elicit our sympathy, adults can be embarrassed and irritated by the seemingly irrational fears of older children. An irate father returned fuming from a swimming trip with his nine-year-old who had sat crying on the pool edge 'too scared to jump in'. Maybe our irritation is because older children's fears resonate with our own.
WE NEED OUR FEARS
Fear is an ordinary and necessary part of human development. Fear keeps us safe and helps us not to take foolhardy risks - or at least not to take them too often! Yet fear is almost invariably seen as, at best, negative and, at worst, immature.
We could argue that at the moment it is an entirely appropriate reaction for Londoners to feel fear and yet they are exhorted, for very good reasons, not least the maintenance of daily life, to be unafraid.
There is nothing wrong with being frightened unless, of course, it prevents the individual experiencing it from enjoying life to the full.
As adults we sometimes forget how scary it is to be a new person in the world. The two- year-old who is terrified he will fall down the lavatory and be flushed away is telling us how it feels to be unsure of how the world works and how powerless and out of control that uncertainty leaves a child.
But a 12-year-old expressing a fear of falling down the lavatory is saying something very different. He knows it is not possible to be flushed away and so we have to think about the internal meaning of this fear for him. By this I mean, what does falling down the lavatory represent for him? In other words, why does he not feel his environment is safe?
A MEANS OF 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 feel, 'Welcome to the human world!'
Sometimes their fears seem quite irrational, such as the two-year-old terrified of feathers, and it is not uncommon for small children to be afraid of characteristics and aspects of people such as a beard or even spectacles. 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.
Club workers were shocked when an eight- year-old began to scream with terror when a leaking pipe caused a small cascade of water to flood down the 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 unexpected adversity.
Some children can become excessively afraid about unlikely events such as the house catching fire or their parents dying. These fears are nearly always symbolic of an underlying fear that the child cannot locate or feels he has to hide. One ten-year-old eventually volunteered that he was afraid the house would burn down because his parents would 'explode it' in one of their frequent rows.
FEAR OR ANXIETY?
Eleven-year-old Rav was happy and content at his out-of-school club where he was something of a star. He was equally successful and popular in his primary school and so his teachers and club workers were both surprised and worried when he began to suffer from panic attacks at the club saying he was terrified to move on to the senior school. In particular, he was afraid that he would be bullied because 'I'm different,' referring to the fact that he was a Sikh and wore a turban.
The staff were puzzled because he had been the only Sikh in his primary school where he had never been singled out for bullying. Quite the reverse, in fact: he was regarded as something quite special. Added to this, there would be a much larger Sikh population at the new school. However, the more the staff tried to reassure him, the more terrified he seemed to grow.
The staff and I began to think of Rav as a child who had got into a muddle.
He was clearly worried that he wouldn't have any friends at secondary school. He had enjoyed feeling special in his successes at both club and primary school and, in a sense, being 'different' as a Sikh enhanced his 'celebrity status'. But now he had got into a muddle in that he was afraid his friendships were based on his 'specialness'. He knew he would not stand out in the same way at his senior school as he knew that both academically and in sports he was going to face much more competition. He feared that if he was not seen as 'special' no one would want to be his friend.
We thought about how deep inside he maybe felt angry and resentful towards the other Sikh boys in his new school, for they too were potential rivals in that they reduced his obvious 'specialness'.
Psychotherapist Adam Phillips has written about how often the thing we fear is paradoxically the very thing we want! Rav was expressing a fear of being singled out for bullying but perhaps he was also wanting to 'bully' the other boys out of being his rivals in specialness.
Rav shows us clearly the difference between a fear and an anxiety. A fear is focused on an identifiable object such as spiders. Anxiety is the same as fear but 'the object' has become obscured - in Rav's case, he was saying he was afraid to go to senior school when really he was afraid of losing his specialness. For this reason, we need to be aware of the risk of interpreting what children say they are afraid of too literally, as the thing they name as their fear may actually be concealing an underlying anxiety.
Sometimes we have to do a great deal of work with a child to uncover the disguise. This takes time and patience. By their very nature, fears are difficult for children to talk about. In Rav's case he needed to be allowed to 'cook' a conversation slowly with his club worker around the 'what ifs'
of his fears. She helped him to work out what he was really afraid of by gently asking questions such as, 'What if you are bullied, what would happen, what is it about you the other boys might want to bully?' and 'What do you think it is about you people like? Why do you think they want to be your friend? What makes you like people?'
MANAGING FEARS
* Children's fears are a means of communication.
* Children may initially need realistic reassurance. For example, to be told that there really are no monsters.
* However, there is a risk in taking children's fears too literally as their fears are often displaced and not what they say they are.
* Understanding fears takes time. You will need to let conversations with children on the 'what ifs' of their fears evolve slowly.
Reference
* Terrors and Experts by Adam Phillips, published by Faber & Faber Andrea Clifford-Poston is an educational therapist and author of Tweens: What to expect and how to survive your child's pre-teenage years (Oneworld, Pounds 8.99)
