Banishing Fears

Antonym ~ a word that means the opposite of another word, Gage Canadian Dictionary

Poets had learned to write up visuals of our emotions in color. Green with envy, red with rage or anger, blue with sorrow.

Positive emotions fill our days with pleasure and negative emotions can fill us with dread and fear making for a intolerable day. Fear is a negative emotion. It can torment us, rob us of sleep, preoccupy our minds and be contagious. After all, how many people get hurt in a stampede when a panic erupts?

Fear arises from a sense of a perceived threat or imminent danger and we react with rapid heartbeats, breathing, sweating and muscle tension. Our children will react dependent upon their environment and parental interaction. Therein lies learning behaviors on how to cope with emotions like terror, denial, withdrawal or acceptance that all is truly well.

The stress on a child can be overwhelming for him or her. Their appropriate responses to people and their surrounding environment is affected and can alter their developing networks both psychologically and neural. If there is no strong attachment with parents then the child is at risk to learn maladaptive behaviors.

The belief that a child is a miniature adult has been found as a major contribution to distorted development. Fortunately, children are quite resilient and can recuperate quickly. Children learn to share the same fears their parents show therefore parental reassurance is needed to send these fears away.

Techniques that parents can use are to encourage positive responses within the child. Such exercises such as rewards, meditation, encouraging religious beliefs, laughter, discussing fears, spending time together, music, and let’s not forget the power of parental displays of appropriate love and affection are all tools that can help a child learn to overcome a fear.

One method I had used was to employ the use of changing his perspective with story telling. My son, back then, was 4 years old and terrified of minnows and dragon flies. He would not go swimming in the water and cry when there were swarms of dragon flies outside in the early evenings.

I picked him up and sat with him on the dock to watch the minnows. I told him they were called "Kissing" minnows. They only wanted to kiss him like mom does and I grabbed him and kissed his nose. We sat there and watched them a while longer. He went swimming the next day and returned with no complaints except the minnows were still trying to kiss him.

Later that same evening when the dragon flies started swarming, he ran into the house crying and said something about monsters. Again, I picked him up and we sat on the bottom of the stairs and I held him close and he was trembling.

I said, ‘See, they are not bothering us. We are on the ground. Those are dragon flies and are out shopping.’ My son asked, ‘Shopping for what?’ and I replied, ‘ They are shopping for mosquitoes and not interested in us at all. They have little baskets and shop just for the biggest and fattest mosquitoes.’ After that day, my son never showed any fears of the minnows or dragonflies.

The best exercise as a parent that we can do is keep an eye and listen to our children. We eventually learn to identify fears and see phobias in our children and caught early, teach them to overcome their fears. Read more --> here.

I hope you found this article informative. Please feel free to leave your comments and share your own observations plus give your Vote. Send me a email if you have a request on a topic of interest or to say Hello! It’s FREE to join my Fan club, subscribe by Email, RSS Feed, grab my Free Widget, Link to me or join me on HubPages, with a click of your mouse.

Article(C)2011 Dame Scribe, all rights reserved. Dame Scribe creates articles and posts online. She creates articles on business skills & development, health, science, technology and society and has a strong passion for writing.