Helping kids to navigate childhood fears

Adults can brush off monsters and burglars as the natural anxieties of childhood but for kids the fear is very real. Katy Gosset looks at which worries crop up when and how we can help.Adults can brush off monsters and burglars as the natural anxieties of childhood but for kids the fear is very real. Katy Gosset looks at which worries crop up when and how we can help.Listen to the episode hereSubscribe free to Are We There Yet? on iTunes, RadioPublic, Spotify, RadioPublic or Stitcher.Five-year-old Harrison* has been spending a lot of time in his parents' bed.That's because someone else has been lurking in his room."At the moment monsters are our big thing," his mother Lucy* says. "It's quite a challenging one for us.""They always hide in the dark but as soon as we turn the light on, they're really fast and they disappear.""And, if we turn the lights off, they are back again really fast."John* says, for his six-year-old, Phillip*, it's comic book images that have 'kind of seeped into his brain and stuck there'."He's started to worry about a lot of things actually. We don't know quite what's stemmed it, but we think there are some images that have been talked about at school which have scared him."Clinical psychologist, Catherine Gallagher says - reassuringly for parents - that fear is completely natural and necessary and some common fears are hardwired."So we come into the world thinking things like loud noises, big animals or heights are not good for survival so probably good to be a little bit cautious about them."But Ms Gallagher warns our 'alarm system' that alerts us to something frightening can get 'hacked' by the 'thinking part of our brain', creating fears that may be unfounded."Through the filter of our thoughts and our experience our alarm system can get tricked into firing, especially for some of us who are genetically a little more vulnerable to being anxious in the first place."So was it fear that people felt in those situations or anxiety?"Fear, by definition, means I'm having that experience of my alarm going off in the presence of something that is actually dangerous."Anxiety is having an experience of fear in the absence of the thing that is actually dangerous.""So these are actually childhood anxieties."Some young people were more susceptible to these kinds of fears than others as they might have a more sensitive temperament or have parents who were themselves anxious, Ms Gallagher said. …Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details