(I am not even pretending to be an expert on child raising, these are just some thoughts I have based on personal experience and miscellaneous reading I have done.)
First of all I am not talking about raising a child who is fearless. For 2 reasons, I think fear is generally a natural reaction, someone who is truly fearless is not sane; and it's not so much the child's fear that I am talking about, it's the parents.
Harkening back to Monday's post, advertising and all of the advice out there make it seem like the world is a terrible place, with sexual predators and diseases and injuries just waiting outside the front door of your house to nail your precious child. This has led to the 'Helicopter Parent' syndrome, of parents who are afraid to let their kids out of the house, and if they go to a play ground they hover around, just a step away to catch their child when they fall. Well this doesn't help anyone in the long term. The parent ends up a nervous wreck, always worried and stressed out. The child ends up never having had to deal with the consequences of 'falling down', and as a result they never develop a real instinct for independence.
An example of this is a friend who has a 1 year old son, this son never lets anyone else hold him, he freaks out if she leaves the room, it's just terrible. Well if you stretch this analogy to what happens when it is time for him to go to school? Well I think these Helicopter Parents are doing the same thing with their bigger kids, teaching them that Mommy and Daddy will always be there, in easy reach, never fostering a sense of independence.
As a parent in today's culture one of the hardest things to do is let go. We are bombarded with all of these 'What if's'. That is why I strongly support this web site and the ideas on there. I know the world has changed, and there are simply more people out there then when I grew up. But that shouldn't stop us from raising independent children capable of fending for themselves to a certain extent.
The other side of this is to teach/raise children to understand fear and learn to deal with it. Know when it is irrational fear that can be ignored, or a rational fear that needs to be listened to. An example, I was afraid of dogs as a child, even though we had a dog of our own, I was not comfortable and would go out of my way on the way to and from school to avoid the unleashed dogs. This was not helped by the fact that I was actually attacked once (a funny story in retrospect, just not that funny then). Well when James was bit by Dennis' dog I was worried that he would let that affect him forever, but he hasn't (at least so far). He has taken a rational fear (barking dog might well attack and bite me) and realized how to deal with it. The next step is the irrational fears: does that storm cloud hold a tornado, is there a shark in that lake? And those fears in most cases can only be solved with education.
So to sum up, it is ok for kids to fear things, so long as they understand why they are afraid and know how to handle it. And the most important thing for parents is to not let our fears for our kids make us so over protective that we raise kids in a shell. Otherwise we face a generation of over dependent children and eventually adults who have never learned to face their fears and rely on someone else to solve their problems.
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