Men and women have different approaches to fears in children. If a woman is going to respond to childhood fears, her first impulse is to take the childhood fear seriously and start working with it. Men are less inclined to work with children’s fears, it is easier and more understandable for them to react to children’s fears: once to support a child, once to shame.
Working with children’s fears is, first of all, a serious attitude to the child’s fears. Oddly enough, this is not always justified. Sometimes the best way to free from fear is the cheerful look of an adult who is confidently surprised: “Why are you afraid of such nonsense? Come on, I’ll show you, it’s not scary at all!
Working with children’s fears has its own specifics, if only because the children themselves very rarely formulate a request for freedom from fear. A typical request of a child: «Sit with me, I’m scared!», while children do not always want to be freed from fear.
Accordingly, either you need to either insist on this, or make it exciting and fun. See Tips for parents: how to help your child cope with fears
It is usually easy to identify a fearful child, given the tension and anxiety in behavior, avoidance of the source of the threat, and a positive response to the question of the presence of fear.
When working with the fears of children, it must be taken into account that often the problem is not the fears of the child, but the fears and anxiety of the parents, and you need to work not with the child, but with the parents, more often mothers and grandmothers. Those parents who do not have the habit of teaching their children to be afraid and who do not reinforce the cowardly behavior of children do not have to work with fears. The most effective way to eliminate nightmares will be to reduce daytime fears in children, increase their self-confidence, improve family relationships, including correcting improper upbringing and neutralizing conflicts. Active, cheerful, fun games during which children have to overcome obstacles, climb trees or attics, go down to the basement or swim in the river — in the best and natural way they help both to prevent and relieve children’s fears of heights, darkness or water .
The main technique in working with fears in children is the removal of the child’s fear of fear.
If the child went to bed and it seemed to him that someone was hiding behind the closet in the dark, the child’s heart may beat. The beating of the heart is a manifestation of the basic fear. If the child begins to pay attention not to the fact that his heart is beating strongly, and will already worry about the beating of the heart (“her heart will not stand it, it will burst, and I will die of fear!”), This is already a secondary fear of the child. If the child manages to explain that his heartbeat and desire to be with his mother is normal and natural, that it happens to all children and we love him, the child becomes calmer.
Children are taught this in a variety of ways. Wordings: “Fear is not scary”, “Fear is normal, everyone is afraid, it’s not shameful to be afraid”, “Fear helps us, fear takes care of us”, “You need to accept your fear” — all these outwardly diverse suggestions have one internal task : a calm, fearless attitude of the child to those psychophysiological processes that are commonly called fear. A similar task is performed by such processes as children drawing their fears and acting out their fears in games, in certain scenes. A child can deal with his own fears if you tell him how to do it.
In all cases, the success of eliminating fears depends on the knowledge of their causes and the characteristics of mental development.