Horror Express
Having a Closer Glance at Your Child’s Anxiety and Phobia
Everybody is capable of feeling anxious at times, in spite of what gender and age, and no matter what social status; we all just become restless about different things in life. Being afraid is not the same as being helpless and halted by your fears, and oftentimes it’s during one’s childhood that the line between the two is imprecise. It is in this sense, as humanistic therapy will claim, that fear is healthy; an unhealthy kind of fear is when it stops you and prevents you from doing normal, significant chores. Sandtray can help people reconnect to who they really are.
There is such a thing as age-appropriate anxiety which speaks of the sorts of anxiety that children experience in stages, as per their age. Babies are often afraid of strangers but they do get over this fear in due course; children who are unable to get past this extreme fear of strangers as they grow old tend to develop social phobia which gets worse as the fear becomes increasingly out of control. However, your child should also be outgrowing some kinds of fear as he or she grow up; the problem of phobias begin when parents don’t see or neglect to acknowledge that their children are failing to outgrow age appropriate fears and may even be developing terrible kinds of fears in the process.
Children grow out of their fears, but there are times when some fears are felt more intensely than others, and this is what people may call phobia. Failing to deal with these phobias suitably can cripple your child by not being able to fulfill normal daily functions because of irrational fear. The whole point is not persuading your child to face the fear head on but not disappointing a fight with the fear either; it’s all a matter of facing your child’s fear on his or her own terms.
If you are a parent of small children who llok like to have grow real phobia, consider taking your child to play therapy. During play therapy, children can find ways of facing their fears in a non-threatening environment, and in their own way, they can understand for themselves that there is nothing to fear from the object of their phobias. During play therapy, your child will be more at ease with the thought of confronting frights and all at once, you can learn more about what to do to help support your child.
Parents would do well not to trivialize their children’s phobias because even if it seems silly or immature, in the mind of a child, the object of the fear is very true and sensible. If a child is afraid of the dark, yelling at him and ordering him to bed in a dark room will only aggravate the situation and heap more negative feelings on the experience of sleeping in a dark room rather than show the child that there is nothing to be afraid of in the dark. On occasion it’s truly best to seek professional help when dealing with children’s phobia; therapists are trained professionals that can give you more awareness regarding what you can do to actually help your child out of the phobia.
Teach your child in a gentle but determined and reliable way how to deal with phobias instead of denying the reality or concealing away from it. In such cases, your care and support as parents would be sorely needed.
Horror Express