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Help Your Child Overcome Their Fears

Kids can have phobias about needles, dogs, darkness and more. Here’s how to help them cope.

Credit...Maddy Price

This story was originally published on Nov. 18, 2019 in NYT Parenting.

One day this summer at camp, my 5-year-old and her friends went on a hike. At some point during their journey, the campers trampled over a wasp nest, making the insects good and angry. By the time my daughter passed over it, two of them stung her. She cried and asked the counselors if she could go home early, but seemed fine by the time my husband got her.

About three weeks later, however, problems began to escalate. First, she refused to eat dinner outside after a wasp buzzed by. Then, she didn’t want to step outside at all, and eventually she refused to travel from the house to the car unless she was carried. We complied, assuming that, because she’s always been a fairly resilient kid, her fear would abate in a few days. But when it didn’t, I texted a child psychologist friend of mine: “Help.” From her response, I realized we’d been handling the situation all wrong. By accommodating her fears, I realized, we’d actually been reinforcing them when ideally we should have been helping her get over them.

Clearly, I had a lot of work to do, so I called some experts to get their advice. Here’s what they said parents should do to help their kids overcome their phobias.

A phobia — which psychologists and psychiatrists call a “specific phobia” — is one of a handful of anxiety disorders that kids can develop. Generally, phobias cause an excessive and uncontrollable fear of an object or situation that’s so intense that it disrupts normal life. (Agoraphobia is a separate anxiety disorder that’s characterized by the fear of being in situations where it may be difficult or embarrassing to escape.)

When a child has a phobia, their “fight or flight” response goes haywire, inciting exaggerated feelings of fear and danger. Kids can have phobias about pretty much anything — bees, dogs, needles, bridges, darkness, heights, loud noises, vomit, even buttons — and research suggests that as many as about 9 percent of children and adolescents experience them. (The proportion goes up considerably if you figure in the less serious cases, like the time my son was scared of the bathtub drain, but not so scared that he wouldn’t bathe if we provided him with the right toys.) Kids can develop phobias suddenly (as mine did) — often triggered by a frightening experience — or slowly over time, which can be harder to figure out.

How, then, should you react if your kid leaps into your arms at the sight of an approaching dog?

First: Help them feel safe. “You want to be empathic, initially, and supportive,” said Thomas Ollendick, Ph.D., a psychologist and director of the Child Study Center at Virginia Tech. “Try to understand the child and accept what they’re feeling.” The goal in this moment is to help your kid calm down, because often they do feel really, really scared.

Once your child is calm, though, you have more work to do. Revisit the moment. “Find out what their mind was telling them,” suggested Tamar Chansky, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist and author of “Freeing Your Child from Anxiety.” Is your kid scared that if a dog bites her, she’ll die or lose a limb? Children can have rather unrealistic ideas about what will happen, and it’s your job to gently correct their misconceptions. Try saying something like, “Oh, if you were thinking a dog could bite off your leg, no wonder you were scared!” Try, also, to figure out exactly what your child is afraid of. Is it all dogs, or just a specific kind of dog? Darkness, or nighttime? It’s important to figure out the source of their fear so you can move on to the next step.

[Learn how to make night terrors less terrifying.]

Parents often make it to this stage, but then stumble: They start accommodating their kid’s fear. It’s totally understandable. If your toddler screams like a banshee whenever she sees the puppy that lives around the corner, of course you’ll start avoiding that house on the way home from day care. But this will only make things worse. “When I have a family with a child with a phobia, they sometimes come in and say, ‘Fortunately, we didn’t have any encounters with dogs this week,’ and I say, ‘Unfortunately! Practice is what is going to help,’” Dr. Chansky said.

This doesn’t mean that you should force your child into a terrifying — or worse, life-threatening — situation. It’s never a good idea, for instance, to throw your water-fearing kid into the pool to “teach” him how to swim. Then he’s terrified and distrustful of you, and that’s not good for anyone. What you should do instead is brainstorm ways to gradually expose your child to the thing he fears. With my daughter, who had become terrified of bees and wasps, I began by talking more about them. I shared cool and reassuring facts (like that male bees can’t sting), and we looked up bee and wasp photos and videos online. The goal was to expose her to the sight and thought of bees and wasps in ways that didn’t terrify her — so that she could replace her fear response with a calmer, more rational one.

As your child becomes more comfortable, slowly ramp up her exposure more and more, and praise her as you do. “Say, ‘Gosh, you did it, that’s great, look at you!’” Dr. Ollendick said. After watching the videos, my daughter and I walked over to a closed window and searched outside for bees and wasps. We watched them and talked to them, and I pointed out that they didn’t seem particularly interested in anything but flowers. Then, we walked outside and stood 15 feet away from a bush surrounded by bees. She was scared, but she held it together, and that’s how I knew we were making progress.

Sometimes, you may not be able to ease your child’s fears by yourself, and you’ll need to seek help from a therapist who specializes in child anxiety. Dr. Ollendick said that if your child’s phobia rears its head frequently (at least once a day), intensely (causing your child to become totally out of control) or lasts a long time (their fear remains acute for hours), then professional help might be warranted. Basically: If it’s really disrupting your child’s life and you can’t resolve it, seek professional help.

We were lucky. After a few days of increasing bee and wasp exposure, which at this point was about three weeks after she’d developed her phobia, my daughter went back to playing outside, and she proudly proclaimed that she didn’t feel scared. That’s not to say she now loves bees and wasps, though, and that’s O.K. Rachel Busman, Psy.D., a clinical psychologist and senior director of the Anxiety Disorders Center at the Child Mind Institute, said that it’s important to teach kids that it’s perfectly normal to worry about something while simultaneously tolerating it. “It doesn’t mean you have to become in love with vomit or love the dentist or love dogs,” Busman said, “but you can probably pass a dog on the street or you can probably get through a thunderstorm or a dental visit and survive.”

One more thing: If your child has a phobia or seems anxious in other ways, pay attention to the ways you might be inadvertently fueling it. “Sometimes parents convey a message of, ‘You can’t handle what’s out there in the world,’” Dr. Busman explained, and doing so will only increase their anxiety. An example might be a parent who senses her child is nervous around dogs and then feeds it by saying “Oh, look, there’s a doggy! Are you scared? Do you want to go back into your stroller since it’s so big?” Or, a parent might drop a child off at preschool and say, “Are you scared you’re going to miss Mommy today?”

This kind of framing suggests to kids that they should feel afraid, and that we as parents don’t have faith that they will be able to manage the situation by themselves. If this is the way you tend to talk, try pausing before you speak and reframing your thoughts. “Lead with your curiosity rather than your fear,” Dr. Busman suggested. Maybe you say, “Have a great day at preschool! What do you think you’re going to do?” That way, you’re not priming your child to be afraid — you’re priming her to feel interested and excited, and you’re sending her the signal that you have confidence in her. The more we show our kids we believe in them, the more they’ll show us what they can do.


Melinda Wenner Moyer is a mom of two and a science journalist who writes for Slate, Mother Jones, Scientific American and O, The Oprah Magazine, among other publications.

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