The leading fear in older preschool children is the fear of death, both of their parents (86,6%) and their own (83,3%). Moreover, in girls, the fear of death is more common than in boys (64% and 36%, respectively). A small number of children (6,6%) experience fear before falling asleep and fear of big streets. Mostly girls experience this fear. In girls of 6 years, the fears of the first group (fears of blood, injections, pain, war, attacks, water, doctors, heights, diseases, fires, animals) are also most clearly represented in comparison with boys of the same age. Of the fears of the second group, girls are most characterized by fears of loneliness, darkness, and of the fears of the third group — the fear of parents, being late for school, punishment. Compared to girls, boys have the following fears more pronounced: fear of depth (50%), certain people (46,7%), fire (42,9%), enclosed space (40%). In general, girls are much more cowardly than boys, but this is hardly genetically set: for the most part, this is a consequence of the fact that girls are allowed to be afraid and mothers fully support girls in their fears.
6-year-old children have already developed an understanding that in addition to good, kind and sympathetic parents, there are also bad ones. The bad ones are not only those who treat the child unfairly, but also those who quarrel and cannot find agreement among themselves. We find reflection in age-typical fears of devils as violators of social rules and established foundations, and at the same time as representatives of the other world. Obedient children who have experienced a feeling of guilt characteristic of age in violation of the rules and regulations in relation to authoritative persons significant to them are more susceptible to the fear of devils.
At the age of 5, transient obsessive repetitions of “indecent” words are characteristic, at the age of 6, children are overcome by anxiety and doubts about their future: “What if I won’t be beautiful?”, “What if no one will marry me?”, in the 7-year-old, suspiciousness is observed: “Won’t we be late?”, “Will we go?”, “Will you buy it?”
Age-related manifestations of obsession, anxiety and suspiciousness themselves disappear in children if the parents are cheerful, calm, self-confident, and also if they take into account the individual and gender characteristics of their child.
Punishment for obscene words should be avoided by patiently explaining their unacceptability and at the same time providing additional opportunities to relieve nervous tension in the game. It also helps to establish friendly relations with children of the opposite sex, and here you can not do without the help of parents.
Anxious expectations of children are dispelled by calm analysis, authoritative explanation and persuasion. With regard to suspiciousness, the best thing is not to reinforce it, to divert the attention of the child, to run with him, play, cause physical fatigue and constantly express your own firm confidence in the certainty of the events taking place.
Divorce of parents in children of older preschool age has a greater adverse effect on boys than on girls. The lack of influence of the father in the family or his absence can make it most difficult for boys to develop sex-appropriate communication skills with peers, cause self-doubt, a sense of powerlessness and doom in the face of danger, albeit imaginary, but filling consciousness.
So, a 6-year-old boy from an incomplete family (his father left after a divorce) was terribly afraid of Zmey Gorynych. “He breathes and that’s it,” was how he explained his fear. By «everything» he meant death. No one knows when the Serpent Gorynych may fly, having risen from the depths of his subconscious, but it is clear that he can suddenly capture the imagination of a boy defenseless in front of him and paralyze his will to resist.
The presence of a constant imaginary threat indicates the absence of psychological protection, not formed due to the lack of adequate father influence. The boy does not have a defender who could kill the Serpent Gorynych, and from whom he could take an example, as from the fabulous Ilya Muromets.
Or let us cite the case of a 5-year-old boy who was afraid of “everything in the world”, was helpless and at the same time declared: “I am like a man.” He owed his infantility to an anxious and overprotective mother who wanted to have a girl and did not take into account his desire for independence in the first years of his life. The boy was drawn to his father and strove to be like him in everything. But the father was removed from the upbringing by the domineering mother, blocking all his attempts to exert any influence on his son.
The impossibility of identifying with the role of a tight-fisted and non-authoritative father in the presence of a restless and overprotective mother — this is the family situation that contributes to the destruction of activity and self-confidence in boys.
One day we drew attention to a confused, shy and timid boy of 7 years old who could not draw a whole family in any way, despite our request. He drew separately either himself or his father, not realizing that the drawing should include both his mother and his older sister. He also could not choose the role of father or mother in the game and become himself in it. The impossibility of identification with the father and his low authority were due to the fact that the father constantly came home tipsy and immediately went to bed. He referred to men «living behind the closet» — inconspicuous, quiet, disconnected from family problems and not involved in raising children.
The boy could not be himself either, since his domineering mother, having been defeated by her father, who was leaving her influence, tried to take revenge in the fight for her son, who, according to her, looked like a despised husband in everything and was just as harmful , lazy, stubborn. It must be said that the son was unwanted, and this constantly affected the attitude of his mother towards him, who was strict with the emotionally sensitive boy, endlessly reprimanded him and punished him. In addition, she overprotected her son, kept her under vigilant control and stopped any manifestations of independence.
It is not surprising that he soon became «harmful», in the mother’s mind, because he tried to somehow prove himself, and to her it reminded him of his father’s former activity. This is what frightened the mother, who does not tolerate any disagreements, seeking to impose her will and subjugate everyone. She, like the Snow Queen, sat on a throne of principles, commanding, pointing, emotionally inaccessible and cold, not understanding the spiritual needs of her son and treating him like a servant. The husband began to drink at one time as a sign of protest, defending himself from his wife with «alcoholic non-existence.»
In a conversation with the boy, we found not only age-related fears, but also many fears coming from the previous age, including punishment from the mother, darkness, loneliness and closed space. The most pronounced was the fear of loneliness, and this is understandable. He has no friend and protector in the family, he is an emotional orphan with living parents.
Unjustified severity, cruelty of the father in relations with children, physical punishment, ignoring spiritual needs and self-esteem also lead to fears.
As we have seen, the forced or conscious substitution of the male role in the family by a domineering mother not only does not contribute to the development of self-confidence in boys, but also leads to the appearance of lack of independence, dependence, helplessness, which are breeding grounds for the propagation of fears that inhibit activity and interfere with self-affirmation. .
In the absence of identification with the mother, girls may also lose self-confidence. But unlike boys, they become more anxious than fearful. If, in addition, the girl cannot express love for her father, then cheerfulness decreases, and anxiety is supplemented by suspiciousness, which leads in adolescence to a depressive shade of mood, a feeling of worthlessness, uncertainty of feelings, desires.
At 5-7 years old, they are often afraid of terrible dreams and death in a dream. Moreover, the very fact of realizing death as an irreparable misfortune, the termination of life occurs most often in a dream: “I walked in the zoo, went to the lion’s cage, and the cage was open, the lion rushed at me and ate it” (a reflection associated with the fear of death, fears attacks and animals in a 6-year-old girl), “I was swallowed by a crocodile” (a 6-year-old boy). The symbol of death is the ubiquitous Baba Yaga, who chases children in a dream, catches them and throws them into the stove (in which the fear of fire, associated with the fear of death, is refracted).
Often in a dream, children of this age may dream of separation from their parents, due to the fear of their disappearance and loss. Such a dream is ahead of the fear of the death of parents in primary school age.
Thus, at 5-7 years old, dreams reproduce present, past (Baba Yaga) and future fears. Indirectly, this indicates the greatest saturation of the senior preschool age with fears.
Terrible dreams also reflect the nature of the attitude of parents, adults to children: “I go up the stairs, stumble, start falling down the steps and just can’t stop, and my grandmother, as luck would have it, takes out newspapers and can’t do anything,” says the girl 7 years, given to the care of a restless and sick grandmother.
A 6-year-old boy, who has a strict father who prepares him for school, told us his dream: “I’m walking down the street and I see Koshchei the Deathless coming towards me, he takes me to school and sets the task: “How much will 2 + 2 be? » Well, of course, I immediately woke up and asked my mother how much it would be 2 + 2, fell asleep again and answered Koshchei that it would be 4″. The fear of making a mistake haunts the child even in his sleep, and he seeks support from his mother.
The leading fear of senior preschool age is the fear of death. Its occurrence means the awareness of the irreversibility in space and time of the ongoing age-related changes. The child begins to understand that growing up at some stage marks death, the inevitability of which causes anxiety as an emotional rejection of the rational need to die. One way or another, the child feels for the first time that death is an inevitable fact of his biography. As a rule, children cope with such experiences themselves, but only if the family has a cheerful atmosphere, if the parents do not talk endlessly about illnesses, that someone has died and something can happen to him (the child) . If the child is already restless, then anxieties of this kind will only increase the age-related fear of death.
The fear of death is a kind of moral and ethical category, indicating a certain maturity of feelings, their depth, and therefore is most pronounced in emotionally sensitive and impressionable children, who also have the ability for abstract, abstract thinking.
The fear of death is relatively more common in girls, which is associated with a more pronounced self-preservation instinct in them, in comparison with boys. But in boys, a more tangible connection can be traced between the fear of death of oneself and, subsequently, parents with fears of strangers, unfamiliar faces, starting from 8 months of life, that is, a boy who is afraid of other people will be more prone to fear of death than a girl who does not have such a sharp oppositions.
According to the correlation analysis, the fear of death is closely related to fears of attack, darkness, fairy-tale characters (more active at 3-5 years old), illness and death of parents (older age), terrible dreams, animals, elements, fire, fire and war. .
The last 6 fears are most typical for senior preschool age. They, as previously listed, are motivated by a threat to life in a direct or indirect form. An attack by someone (including animals), as well as a disease, can result in irreparable misfortune, injury, death. The same applies to storm, hurricane, flood, earthquake, fire, conflagration and war as immediate threats to life. This justifies our definition of fear as an affectively sharpened self-preservation instinct.
Under adverse life circumstances, the fear of death contributes to the strengthening of many fears associated with it. So, after the death of her beloved hamster, a 7-year-old girl became whiny, touchy, stopped laughing, could not watch and listen to fairy tales, because she wept bitterly from pity for the heroes and could not calm down for a long time.
The main thing was that she was terribly afraid of dying in her sleep, like a hamster, so she could not fall asleep alone, experiencing spasms in her throat from excitement, asthma attacks and frequent urges to go to the toilet. Remembering how her mother once said in her hearts: “It would be better for me to die,” the girl began to fear for her life, as a result of which the mother was forced to sleep with her daughter.
As we can see, the case with the hamster fell just at the age maximum of the fear of death, actualized it and led to an exorbitant growth in the imagination of an impressionable girl.
At one of the receptions, we observed a capricious and stubborn, according to his mother, 6-year-old boy who could not be left alone, could not stand darkness and heights, was afraid of an attack, that he would be stolen, that he would be lost in the crowd. He was afraid of a bear and a wolf even in pictures and because of this he could not watch children’s programs. We got full information about his fears from conversations and games with the boy himself, since for his mother he was just a stubborn child who did not obey her orders — to sleep, not to whine and control himself.
By analyzing his fears, we wanted to understand what motivates them. They did not specifically ask about the fear of death, so as not to draw too much attention to it, but this fear could be unmistakably «calculated» from the complex of associated fears of darkness, confined space, heights, and animals.
In darkness, as in a crowd, one can disappear, dissolve, abyss; height implies the danger of falling; the wolf can bite, and the bear can crush. Consequently, all these fears meant a concrete threat to life, an irreversible loss and disappearance of oneself. Why was the boy so afraid of disappearing?
Firstly, the father left the family a year ago, disappearing, in the child’s mind, forever, because the mother did not allow him to meet. But something similar happened before, when the mother, anxious and suspicious by nature, overprotected her son and tried in every possible way to prevent the influence of a determined father on him. However, after the divorce, the child became more unstable in behavior and capricious, at times hyperexcitable «for no reason», was afraid of attacks and stopped being alone. Soon, other fears «sounded» in full force.
Secondly, he has already «disappeared» as a boy, turned into a defenseless and shy creature without a gender. His mother had, in her own words, boyish traits of behavior in childhood, and even now she considered her belonging to the female sex an unfortunate misunderstanding. Like most such women, she passionately wanted to have a daughter, rejecting her son’s boyish character traits and not accepting him as a boy. She expressed her credo once and for all like this: “I don’t like boys at all!”
In general, this means that she does not like all males, since she considers herself a “man”, moreover, she earns more than her ex-husband. Immediately after marriage, she, as an «emancipated» woman, launched an uncompromising struggle for her «feminine dignity», for the right to single-handedly dispose of the family.
But the husband also claimed a similar role in the family, so a struggle began between the spouses. When the father saw the futility of his attempts to influence his son, he left the family. It was then that the boy developed the need to identify with the male role. The mother began to play the role of the father, but since she was anxious and suspicious and raised her son like a girl, the result of this was only an increase in the fears of the “feminized” boy.
No wonder he was afraid that he would be stolen. His activity, independence and boyish «I» have already been «stolen» from him. The neurotic, morbid state of the boy seemed to tell the mother that she needed to rebuild herself, but she stubbornly did not consider it necessary to do this, continuing to accuse her son of stubbornness.
After 10 years, she came to us again — with complaints about her son’s refusal to attend school. This was a consequence of the inflexibility of her behavior and her son’s inability to communicate with peers at school.
In other cases, we are faced with a child’s fear of being late — for a visit, for kindergarten, etc. At the heart of the fear of being late, of not being in time, is an indefinite and anxious expectation of some kind of misfortune. Sometimes such fear acquires an obsessive, neurotic connotation when children torment their parents with endless questions-doubts like: “Will we be late?”, “Will we have time?”, “Will you come?”.
Waiting intolerance is manifested in the fact that the child “burns out emotionally” before the onset of some specific, pre-planned event, for example, the arrival of guests, going to the cinema, etc.
Most often, the obsessive fear of being late is inherent in boys with a high level of intellectual development, but with insufficiently expressed emotionality and spontaneity. They are taken care of a lot, controlled, regulated every step by not very young and anxiously suspicious parents. In addition, mothers would prefer to see them as girls, and they treat boyish self-will with emphasized adherence to principles, intolerance and intolerance.
Both parents are characterized by a heightened sense of duty, the difficulty of compromises, combined with impatience and poor tolerance for expectations, maximalism and inflexibility of thinking of the “all or nothing” type. Like their fathers, boys are not self-confident and are afraid not to justify the inflated demands of their parents. Figuratively speaking, boys, with an obsessive fear of being late, are afraid not to catch their boyish train of life, which rushes non-stop from the past to the future, bypassing the bus stop of the present.
The obsessive fear of being late is a symptom of a painfully sharpened and fatally insoluble inner restlessness, that is, neurotic anxiety, when the past frightens, the future disturbs, and the present excites and puzzles.
A neurotic form of expression of the fear of death is the obsessive fear of infection. Usually it is the fear of diseases inspired by adults, from which, according to them, one can die. Such fears fall on the fertile soil of increased age-related sensitivity to fears of death and flourish in the lush color of neurotic fears.
Here’s what happened to a 6-year-old girl living with a suspicious grandmother. Once she read (already knew how to read) in a pharmacy that you can’t eat food on which a fly will land. Shocked by such a categorical ban, the girl began to feel guilt and anxiety for his repeated “violations”. She was afraid to leave food, it seemed to her that there were some points on its surface, etc.
Overwhelmed by the fear of getting infected and dying from it, she washed her hands endlessly, refused, despite thirst and hunger, to drink and eat at a party. There was tension, stiffness, and “reversed confidence” – obsessive thoughts about impending death from accidentally eating contaminated food. Moreover, the threat of death was perceived literally, as something probable, as a punishment, a punishment for violating the ban.
To be infected with such fears, you need to be psychologically unprotected by your parents and already have a high level of anxiety, backed up by a restless and protective grandmother in everything.
If we do not take such clinical cases, then the fear of death, as already noted, does not sound, but dissolves in fears common for a given age. Nevertheless, it is better not to subject the psyche of emotionally sensitive, impressionable, nervously and somatically weakened children to additional trials, such as an operation to remove the adenoids (there are conservative methods of treatment), painful medical manipulations without special need, separation from their parents and placement for several months in a «health » sanatorium, etc. But this does not mean isolating children at home, creating an artificial environment for them that eliminates any difficulties and levels their own experience of failures and achievements.