He likes to be afraid

Be scared, Baby loves it!

The little ones love surprise games that make them shudder. Did you know that they are also beneficial for their development?

When our little guy asked us to reread the end of “Little Red Riding Hood” for the third time, the passage where the grandmother gets eaten up, we already ticked off a bit. Besides, we did not remember that this tale was so violent! But he asks for more, to believe that he is masochistic… Should we let him?

Our blond angel Would he be turning into a bloodthirsty monster, watered down version of the American-style ramshackle kids whose media stuff us with reports? “I told myself that it was my fault, that if my daughter liked scary stories, it was because she was growing up in a violent world that had already rubbed off on her”, explains Nadia, mother of Chloe, 2 and a half years old. Yet the truth is… elsewhere! But for once, there is nothing scary about it. “Rest assured, fear is an ancestral mechanism that is part of the survival instinct : when you are afraid, the vessels dilate, the heart beats faster, the brain is better supplied with water, the muscles are tense, ready to intervene, we are at our maximum potential. And it is thanks to this fear that paradoxically, we are making progress, ”explains Dr Frédéric Kochman, child psychiatrist.

And to think that it almost starts in the cradle …

You have of course noticed that your baby, even though a few weeks old, was afraid of foreign faces, then later to leave you (ah, the anguish of separation!). Then he will cry when he goes to kindergarten. Well, we can swallow our guilt right away! We would have saved him that he would have found something else. Because the life of a child is marked by fears which help him to surpass himself since he always ends up overcoming them. And finally he asks for more, in small doses, in the form of games or stories to better understand them.

It is because he will have dared to face the wolf that he will later have the courage to raise his finger at school when the teacher asks a question. A “cause-effect” relationship confirmed by Dr. Kochman: “Above all, let it be! Fear is natural and plays a major role in the psychological, intellectual, and emotional development of one’s personality. It is by confronting his anxieties that the little one learns to manage them, overcome them, that he builds himself, that is what makes him move forward ”. To confine it to a world of marshmallows is to keep it in a regressive state, and what is great is that instinctively the pitchoun already knows it, since he is trying to get out of it. And not just to assert yourself.