What are the reasons for the appearance of various fears in children and how to get rid of them. Valuable advice for parents who want to protect their child from phobias. Children are characterized by several types of fears that they face in the period of growing up and learning the new world. Everyone has a tendency to develop after the trigger factor or against the background of a sensitive personality. Very often, childhood phobias result in terrible dreams that recur over time. They are emotionally exhausting, and the child practically trembles even at the mention of any factors associated with his fear. Dreams can be the first call to the development of a full-fledged phobia, which very often remains for life.
For their own protection, children often create imaginary friends for themselves, endow them with superpowers and sincerely believe that they will protect them. Such a mechanism protects the calmness of the child, and it cannot be destroyed just like that. You must first get rid of the phobia, and then the need for imaginary friends will disappear by itself.
If the baby reacts quite sharply to emotional factors, often cries or gets angry, it means that he is quite vulnerable to the manifestations of childhood phobias. At its core, it is a way to deal with misunderstanding of certain things and phenomena in this world. If the child does not know something, it means that it can pose a threat - impressionable individuals follow exactly this principle.
Varieties of fears in children
An emotionally unstable child reacts in a special way to what is happening. What an adult has long been accustomed to, and which does not cause him any reason for concern, for the child's psyche may turn out to be a complete shock that will form a persistent phobia. Depending on what the situation for the baby has become a shock, such fear appears. The more emotional he is, the brighter the manifestations of such fears will be. Consider the main types of fears in children:
- Fear of death … This fear can concern both the child himself, who is afraid for his life, and parents and loved ones, because they are the most valuable thing he has. It is perfectly normal for adults to perceive the change of generations, aging and the process of dying. Every person in adulthood fully accepts the inevitability of the future and learns to live with it. To find out to a child that one day there will be no parents, relatives and even himself, at a very young age is often beyond the strength of the child's psyche. The fact of any inevitability, especially such a fatal one, is hard to perceive. Therefore, you should talk with your baby about this and, if possible, avoid attending the funeral. Often, visual images can be more stable than verbal attitudes. They can provoke dreams and vivid phobias.
- Fear of punishment … Often it is associated with the special conditions of raising children in a family. If punishment for wrong actions plays a very important role in the pedagogical process, it means that the whole world of the child revolves on what needs to be done so that he is not considered guilty. The fear of being unworthy of their parents arises, self-esteem decreases. Such children, even in the absence of physical punishment, can show such fears, because most of all they are afraid not of pain, but of the fact that their parents will be unhappy with them.
- Fear of fairy tale characters … He is wholly and completely provoked by telling impressionable tales. Negative characters are introduced into them only to show how good always triumphs over evil. That is why it is impossible to focus on negative characters. Impressive psyche and violent imagination of a child will instantly draw in the subconscious mind the terrible Baba Yaga or the Serpent Gorynych. Often for the kid in fairy tales, it is not good characters who win. That is why one should focus on the kindness and the good side of the tale, on the positive heroes and on the invariable victory of good.
- Fear of the dark … This type of phobias can be associated with others, including previous ones, or develop independently. This is often the most common type of fear. An impressionable kid can easily imagine in the darkness any monsters and monsters that can only be imagined. The child develops a sense of fear in any stressful situation. Moving to a new house or a new room, where you have to spend the night alone, often plays a role. Sometimes such a phobia is provoked by watching a movie with bloody scenes or horrors, because they are not intended for children.
How to overcome a child's feelings of fear
The best way to deal with childhood fears is to prevent them from appearing, to explain to the child in time everything that causes him to fear. If fear does appear, you should help the baby get rid of it. Many parents ask themselves how to overcome fear for children, because their psyche is not yet able to resist external stress factors, and most importantly, how to prevent it from going into adulthood. There are several techniques that parents can use to help their child cope with fear:
- Remove the stress factor … Of course, if possible, you can remove the provoking factor that triggered the formation of the phobia. For example, if a baby is panicky about a thing or punishment, you should remove it and start basing your upbringing on other things. Ideally, for such a child, parenting should be based on rewards rather than punishments. You should not threaten any negative consequences in the event of disobedience or evasion of one's duties.
- Talk … You can help a child with a phobia through regular parenting conversation. It is necessary to sort out his fear and find exactly what caused it. For example, if a negative character from a fairy tale scares you, you should tell a more believable happy ending to your child and explain that fairy tales always end well and nothing threatens him.
- Security … The second thing a child with a phobia wants to feel is the confidence in safety. You should hug him more often and take care so that he feels that he is not alone. Excessive repulsion and an emphasis on independence in this case can only aggravate the baby's condition.
- Positive … If you get to the bottom of phobias, they are an emotional manifestation of something bad. Against this background, anxiety develops - a constant feeling of approaching what the child is afraid of. In this state, he will very soon close in himself and give out depressive or hysterical manifestations. You should take it and show that a sea of goodness and joy can be obtained from life without focusing on your fears.
How to overcome fear in a child - watch the video:
If the fear has a fairly persistent form and is not corrected, you should consult a specialist. An experienced psychiatrist or psychotherapist knows how to relieve a child of fears.
