Causes Of Child Fear & Anxiety – How Children Develop Fear & Anxiety

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Where do fears come from? Some, as you recall, are innate, like fear of falling, of loud noises, of the dark and of strangers. Other fears we learn.

Roots of Fear – What Causes Fear:

Here is a brief overview of different causes of fear.

Classical Conditioning:

When eight-month-old Molly sees her doctor, she starts to cry. She has become conditioned to associate the sight of her doctor with the pain of getting an injection. In fact, she starts to cry when she sees any man in a white shirt or beard, like her doctor.

Children learn a lot of fears through classical conditioning of a neutral stimulus—the doctor—with an unconditioned response—pain. Often, they generalize these fears to similar persons or situations, as did Molly.

In the 1920s, the behaviorist John Watson conducted one of the earliest demonstrations of classical conditioning that showed that emotions such as fear can be conditioned. As an 11-month-old baby known as “Little Albert,” who loved furry animals, was about to grasp a white rat, a loud noise frightened him, and he began to cry.

After repeated pairings of the rat with the loud noise, the child whimpered with fear when he saw the rat. The fear also generalized to rabbits, dogs, a Santa Claus mask, and other furry white objects.

Operant Conditioning:

When Molly starts to cry, her mother holds her tight and soothes her. This reduces Molly’s fear. In a sense, it also rewards Molly for feeling fearful since it gets her mother’s attention and nurturance. With her mother’s tender love and care, Molly will likely outgrow this fear.

Nevertheless, parents can unwittingly encourage fears by positively reinforcing them with attention. For instance, when eight-year-old Yaacov said he didn’t feel like going to school, his mother kept him home where he watched television all day and ate chocolate cookies. The next day he announced to his mother that he’d like to stay home all week!

Imitation:

Your own reactions also lay the groundwork for unwittingly creating fears in your children. If you cower at the sight of thunder, your child picks up that there’s a reason to be afraid and may imitate your reaction. In fact, parents and children often have similar fears.

How Children Develop Fear – Can Parents Cause Child Anxiety?

Sensitive, loving parents take their children’s fears seriously and respond to them with cookies and sympathy, with nurturance and understanding. At the same time, they neither overreact with hysteria, which increases the child’s anxiety, nor diminish their meaning, which makes the child feel unprotected and her feelings invalidated.

Structuring and organizing their child’s life with consistent and fair rules, supervision, schedules, and an environment that neither over- nor under stimulates, they maximize certainty, predictability, safety and protection.

Fears don’t get out of hand because what the monsters symbolize by being abandoned, overpowered, disapproved of, helpless, a failure, or losing “me” and being annihilated altogether—is not perceived as a direct threat. The barking dog is not what is likely to hurt the child. It is the power of the barking, angry father who might hurt or desert you.

Fear of monsters also symbolizes the child’s own monstrous behaviour with the monster within that makes fathers irritate.

But when parents, for whatever reason, don’t create a warm, nurturing, organized and secure environment, biology dominates and the child becomes even more reactive,fearful and easily overwhelmed by stress. This is especially true for the fear-prone child.

If a six year old has to feel humiliated the day of the school picture because her mother forgot to dress her up, or feel afraid to give her mother the carefully drawn Mother’s Day card because it will go straight into the garbage and if she has to worry about love, it’s hard to just concentrate on being a six year old.

Instead, she will begin to worry about how to behave to avoid the frown on the mother’s face and the edge in the mother’s voice. Inside, she will be so twisted with fears and terrible consequences that it’s hard to learn or have fun or feel confident that people will like you.

She might also learn that fears come in handy when they force parental protection. A child may begin to fear the dark, for instance, if it means an otherwise distant mother holds her while she falls asleep. Or she may begin to fear swimming in water if the ignoring, distant father lets her ride the waves on his back.

All in the Family

Children are part of a family. And families behave like mobiles: when one part moves, the whole configuration is changed. In other words, the behavior of each family member affects everyone else. If childhood fears linger or intensify, the underlying cause, according to Dr. Joel Feiner, author of Taming Monsters, Slaying Dragons, may be their use as a ploy to divert attention away from the parent’s own unresolved marital, job, or emotional conflicts.

In the ideal family situation, the strongest bond is between the two parents and this helps sustain each to have the emotional wherewithal for their children. Family roles are flexible, communication is open so people really listen to each other and the outlook is positive and upbeat. All of this makes fear less likely to settle in and grow out of proportion.

But if this bond is shattered, by marital friction or divorce, mother or father may instead turn to the child for support and the stronger bond develops with the child. Roles become muddied, as the child assumes the responsibility for meeting the parent’s emotional needs. And this is fertile ground for fears. The fear might be used as a coalition between mother and child to exclude father. For instance, daddy won’t let the frightened child snuggle into the family bed so mommy snuggles with the child in the child’s bed.

But since life is really shaky without daddy’s involvement, fears might intensify to force an alliance between the parents and greater parental protection. The child might, for instance, develop a fear of water since his screams get both mommy and daddy concerned and working together to calm him.

How do Children Develop Fear

In a Dennis the Menace cartoon by Ketcham, Dennis stands at the foot of his half sleeping parents’ bed and says, “It’s easy for you to say, ‘Don’t be afraid of the dark’… You got somebody to sleep with!”

Of all childhood memories, few are more frightening than those long nights alone, and few are more poignant than slipping into sleep locked safely in your mother or father’s arms? Solitary sleeping can be a time of separation, loneliness, anxiety, and fear of sleep that breeds uncertainties and insecurities in children and explains why many behave at bedtime as if banished to a dungeon.

To what extent might our children’s fears in this society be exacerbated by sleeping alone in a room, which is unheard of anywhere else in the world? Though our child care experts caution that co-sleeping creates dependency and advise parents to not sleep with their children, most children in the world sleep in bed with their mother or in the same room, and always have.

These cultures do not report the sleep problems common here and the endless rituals and “lovies” to get a child to sleep, fear of the dark, frequent night awakenings and nightmares. As for our fear of dependency, that stems not from co-sleeping but from the nature of the parent-child relationship. In healthy families, children generally leave the family bed on their own by age three to four, returning only during times of high stress.

You’ve Got to Be Taught to Be Afraid

Fears are as catchy as colds. If you are afraid of something and convey it, your children will pick it up. Tony Dorsett, one of football’s giants, is a good example. As a child, he was taught that spirits walk a house left in complete darkness and so his parents always left the doors open a bit to allow a crack of light to come through. Even as an adult, he cannot sleep in the dark. “In my house,” says Dorsett, “you see lights on everywhere.”

Terror on the Tube

For the first time in human history, parents are not in control of what influences their children, the media has taken over that role. In days of yore (pre-television!), children did not confront the likes of animated witches, King Kong or Freddie Kruger. They met their monsters mostly in their imagination, through nursery rhymes or scary stories, like fairy tales, that were told or read to them from books that had few or no pictures.

This allowed the child to conjure up his own image of ghosts and witches in terms of what he could handle. How many children do you know who become frightened when hearing the nursery rhyme “Three Blind Mice, They all ran after the farmer’s wife, She cut off their tails with a carving knife?”

In fairy tales, which start with “Long ago and far away,” children are reassured that there is no imminent danger. This is also why they so like dinosaur.: Before the movie Jurassic Park, they were confident they would never run into one!

And the frightening symbols of monsters in fairy tales are often gotten rid of by the children themselves, who slay the dragon, fell the giant, and burn the wicked witch. This increases the child’s confidence that they themselves can learn to tame their own fears.

Television, in contrast, often portrays horrifying images beyond what children can manage and exacerbates their view of the world as scary and dangerous.

First Steps in the Monster Mash

As a parent, you can’t stop your child from feeling afraid. But you can do much to tame the monsters and prevent them from taking residence. First, though, you need to identify your child’s fears.

Using the list on the following page, check off the category or categories in which your child displays fears. In the blank space, fill in your child’s specific fears. Mark with an asterisk those that are strong enough to constitute a phobia for those that are unusually intense, persist over time and cause avoidance that disrupts your child’s life. For instance, if your child reacts fearfully to strange men, underneath strangers write “men.” If your child reacts phobicly to getting a shot, underneath medical, write “getting a shot*”.

How do Children Develop Fear

In a Dennis the Menace cartoon by Ketcham, Dennis stands at the foot of his half sleeping parents’ bed and says, “It’s easy for you to say, ‘Don’t be afraid of the dark’… You got somebody to sleep with!”

Of all childhood memories, few are more frightening than those long nights alone, and few are more poignant than slipping into sleep locked safely in your mother or father’s arms? Solitary sleeping can be a time of separation, loneliness, anxiety, and fear of sleep that breeds uncertainties and insecurities in children and explains why many behave at bedtime as if banished to a dungeon.

To what extent might our children’s fears in this society be exacerbated by sleeping alone in a room, which is unheard of anywhere else in the world? Though our child care experts caution that co-sleeping creates dependency and advise parents to not sleep with their children, most children in the world sleep in bed with their mother or in the same room, and always have.

These cultures do not report the sleep problems common here and the endless rituals and “lovies” to get a child to sleep, fear of the dark, frequent night awakenings and nightmares. As for our fear of dependency, that stems not from co-sleeping but from the nature of the parent-child relationship. In healthy families, children generally leave the family bed on their own by age three to four, returning only during times of high stress.

You’ve Got to Be Taught to Be Afraid

Fears are as catchy as colds. If you are afraid of something and convey it, your children will pick it up. Tony Dorsett, one of football’s giants, is a good example. As a child, he was taught that spirits walk a house left in complete darkness and so his parents always left the doors open a bit to allow a crack of light to come through. Even as an adult, he cannot sleep in the dark. “In my house,” says Dorsett, “you see lights on everywhere.”

Terror on the Tube

For the first time in human history, parents are not in control of what influences their children, the media has taken over that role. In days of yore (pre-television!), children did not confront the likes of animated witches, King Kong or Freddie Kruger. They met their monsters mostly in their imagination, through nursery rhymes or scary stories, like fairy tales, that were told or read to them from books that had few or no pictures.

This allowed the child to conjure up his own image of ghosts and witches in terms of what he could handle. How many children do you know who become frightened when hearing the nursery rhyme “Three Blind Mice, They all ran after the farmer’s wife, She cut off their tails with a carving knife?”

In fairy tales, which start with “Long ago and far away,” children are reassured that there is no imminent danger. This is also why they so like dinosaur.: Before the movie Jurassic Park, they were confident they would never run into one!

And the frightening symbols of monsters in fairy tales are often gotten rid of by the children themselves, who slay the dragon, fell the giant, and burn the wicked witch. This increases the child’s confidence that they themselves can learn to tame their own fears.

Television, in contrast, often portrays horrifying images beyond what children can manage and exacerbates their view of the world as scary and dangerous.

First Steps in the Monster Mash

As a parent, you can’t stop your child from feeling afraid. But you can do much to tame the monsters and prevent them from taking residence. First, though, you need to identify your child’s fears.

Using the list on the following page, check off the category or categories in which your child displays fears. In the blank space, fill in your child’s specific fears. Mark with an asterisk those that are strong enough to constitute a phobia for those that are unusually intense, persist over time and cause avoidance that disrupts your child’s life. For instance, if your child reacts fearfully to strange men, underneath strangers write “men.” If your child reacts phobicly to getting a shot, underneath medical, write “getting a shot*”.