If there’s one thing I want to do as a parent, it’s to minimize the amount of negative feelings that my children experience. Basically, I want them to be happy. Everyone is going to feel pain, anger, jealousy and fear in their lifetimes, and my goal is not to avoid those things all together, but rather to help them deal with those feelings so that they can effectively deal with them and keep negative emotions to a minimum.
Things like anger, frustration, or jealousy are not that hard to deal with because they can usually be explained away in a way that makes sense, at least to my children. “Well, yes that boy has a balloon and you don’t, but you have an ice cream and he doesn’t, and besides you have a balloon at home.” Problem (usually) solved. But fear is a tricky emotion to deal with, because fear is often irrational.
When people make decision based on fear, the outcome is almost never what they were hoping for. They lose sight of the big picture and only focus on very selfish “here and now” factors. But try and explaining that to a three year old! I found that my general method of explaining things was not working with Ruby when she was afraid of something. So I came up with a new plan.
Whenever Ruby was afraid of something, I would pretend to be even more afraid of it. In fact, I would take it to such extremes as to be afraid of nearly everything around me. Generally this produced hilarious results and Ruby would end up laughing too hard to be scared. I would decide I was terrified of chairs and, upon seeing a chair, run to hide behind another chair, only to realize I was touching a scary chair! And so and so forth. By the end of it, Ruby would be explaining to me why things were not scary.
One of Ruby’s favorite things to do for a long time was to get out her doctor’s kit and give me a check-up. She would go through all the items in the order in which they were attached to the kit, starting with the blood pressure, and ending with the shot. Every time we play that I game and try and hide from the shot. She will say to me “Oh Dad, it’s not as bad as that!” and give me the shot, at which point I will say “Waaah, waaaahhhh!” and she will laugh. Then when I give her the shot she just smiles and says, “See? It doesn’t hurt!” Then, when we went in for her 3 year check-up at the real doctor, she had to get a shot. I went right back into game mode and told her it would really hurt and she would say “Waaah, waaaahhhh!” and she just laughed. The doctor came, gave her the shot, and smiled the whole way through.
Maybe she will grow up thinking I am a big wimp. Actually, that is pretty accurate, so nevermind. But my point is, that if I can spare her some fear, and if I can show her that the world is not a scary place, but an exciting place filled with challenges instead of obstacles, that I am happy to play scared on her behalf. And parents, this trick also works with eating scary vegetables too. You’re welcome.
My father always had success with the extreme opposite. He always told us that if we were ever afraid of something, we should look at him and see if he was afraid too… if he wasn’t, then everything was OK. Surprisingly, that worked really well. I’ve actually used the same tactic on other people who (momentarily) weren’t dealing well with anxiety.
It’s funny, there are times when I don’t want to be afraid of something, so I will have one of her stuffed animals do it. It works just as well having her explain to her teddy bear why the dark is not scary.
As an aside, the method I described doesn’t work if the person who’s afraid thinks you’re an idiot.