Helping Anxious Children to Overcome Fear

Dr. Tali Shenfield | March 4, 2016

If you've ever been so overwrought with worry that your patience fell short, or snapped at someone else because something unnerved you unexpectedly, you've experienced the intrinsic connection that exists between fear and anger. Just as fear can, when it is chronic, in effect bully the person experiencing it—constantly telling him what he can and cannot do—it can turn otherwise well-meaning individuals into tyrants who desperately try to force others around them to conform to their own fear-driven needs and expectations.

This is a reality that the parents of fearful children know all too well; when a child is ruled by anxiety, whole households can become tyrannized by that child's attempts to take control of his or her surroundings and restore a sense of “safety”. At the same time, often various well-meaning attempts to pacify the child in question seem to only exacerbate the issue, until the rest of the family fears there must be no way out, no light at the end of the tunnel. Sometimes, child fears are so strong that they may experience an anger overload, a condition that may require special treatment.

What many parents fail to realize is that, in trying to “help” their child, they all too often wind up enabling his or her fears. While fears and anxieties are highly treatable, they require the right approach; the right balance between compassion and “tough love” needed to show children that they are accepted as people, whilst also demonstrating that the object of their fright is, in reality, not nearly so terrifying as they imagine it to be.

 

How Much Fear is Too Much?

Fear is a normal part of childhood; the vast majority of children go through various “phases” of fear—fear of the dark, fear of insects, fear of strangers, etc.—and grow out of them without issue.

Fear becomes problematic when it is both severe and chronic to a point where it interrupts the child's normal functioning (becoming what is known as a paralysing fear) and thereafter spirals out to interrupt the entire family's normal functioning. This type of fear is often associated with an anxiety disorder, you can evaluate your child's level of anxiety and the risk of GAD using online anxiety test on this page.

A child who cannot sleep without a nightlight on for a period of months or even years (owing to a fear of the dark), but who does settle down so long as his room is somewhat lit, sleeps normally, and goes to school without further problems arising, is experiencing a “normal” fear of the unknown. On the other hand, a child who still cannot sleep even with a nightlight and who demands to sleep with his parents every single night, or routinely wakes them up to investigate imagined threats, can be said to be experiencing an extreme, paralysing, and ultimately tyrannical fear.

Any time a child's fear begins to make life unmanageable for the rest of the family—when a child who fears insects goes into hysterics on every family outing to the park, or when a child who fears strangers can't make it through a simple trip to the grocery store, and so on—it has exceeded the acceptable parameters of normal developmental fear and must be treated as such. If this extreme fear is not addressed promptly, the whole family may soon find themselves in a state of codependency not unlike that experienced by the families of addicts, whose lives are completely governed by the destructive cycle of addiction.

 

Treating Fear and Anxiety in Children

The good news is that there are a few “tried and true” methods available for treating fear and anxiety in children, and they have been shown to have a high success rate. In general, no matter the exact nature of the fear, some form of exposure therapy will be needed; even for very “general” fearfulness (i.e. anxiety), exposure to triggering stimuli is often necessary in order to overcome the patterns of avoidance the child has adopted to cope with the anxiety.

Exposure therapy is effective due to the fact that repeatedly exposing one's self to the object of one's fears proves that whatever dreadful consequences the fearful individual was imagining do not in fact occur. This literally “re-trains” the brain, encouraging it to form new and more accurate associations, which dramatically lessens the fear response.

Of course, this process must be handled carefully; if exposure is forced, the stress of the event may reinforce the fearful associations, worsening the problem. In order to be effective, “exposure therapy” must be enacted systematically, using an approach that incrementally inches a person into closer contact with the thing they fear the most. As these baby steps are taken, it's important to know when to take a “time out” to let the person relax and realize that they are still safe.

While it's true that a more immediate and intense approach known as “flooding” or “immersion” is sometimes used to treat phobias in adults, this is not recommended when treating children. Adults have the ability to rationalize and understand this onslaught of stimuli, to grasp what it means and learn from it, whereas most children do not—they will instead simply react to the upset the event causes and further withdraw.

As such, children should be gently pushed—in small doses—to overcome their resistance to exposure, and given positive reinforcement each time they manage to inch closer to whatever is causing their fright. At the same time, parents must be shown how to avoid “enabling” the child through catering to his or her desire to avoid things he or she deems unpleasant, and made to understand how doing so can, in effect, prove to the child that there really is something to fear.

While breaking a child's fearful habits is delicate and often difficult work, it comes with lifelong rewards. Children who manage to overcome their fears and phobias not only lead more relaxed lives, they invariably grow up to be more confident adults, aware of their own capability to master hostile situations and emerge victorious. They become the captains of their own destiny, and—satisfied with this sense of self-direction—cease attempting to direct the lives of those around them.

 

 

About Tali Shenfield

Dr. Tali Shenfield holds a PhD in Psychology from the University of Toronto and is a licensed school and clinical psychologist. She has taught at the University of Toronto and has worked at institutions including the Hospital for Sick Children, Hincks-Dellcrest Centre, TDSB, and YCDSB. Dr. Shenfield is the Founder and Clinical Director of Advanced Psychology Services.

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