Читать книгу The Courageous Classroom - Jed Dearybury - Страница 12

Fear is a normal part of psychological development for infants and children and critical to our survival across the lifespan. At every developmental stage, conquering fear allows children to grow, take risks, be adventurous, remain open to possibilities, and stay curious. Traversing through life is dependent upon the brain identifying patterns of familiar associations that may signal a dangerous outcome versus safety, and the ability to update those associations as our circumstances change. Fear is the associated learning of memories and the emotional and internal response generated by them. As we grow and develop throughout our lives, fear learning (distinguishing between what's safe and/or dangerous) and the ability to overcome or adapt to fear (fear extinction) by diminishing, reversing, or cognitively controlling fear as our circumstances change, is important to our survival, growth, and learning.

Infants learn early from their caregivers the necessary cues of who may be a threat and who is safe and who needs to be kept around. Infants learn early how to recognize and remember their caregiver by how they are touched, what they hear, smell, and can see (Debiec and Sullivan 2017). The quality and characteristics of those interactions shape infant behavior and physiologic response early on. Psychologist John Bowlby theorized that an attachment relationship to at least one primary caregiver is the most important aspect of social and emotional learning for a child. Attachment learning begins at birth and so does the learning of fear.

Caregivers can trigger a fear response in infants and children through social referencing. Social referencing refers to how a child uses caregiver cues to evaluate certain situations, like when a stranger comes close. Studies show that infants are very sensitive to a caregiver's emotional state, including fear and anxiety and readily pick up on it. From birth, we are primed to both attach for safety to our caregivers, learn about fear from them, and practice behavior that promotes our survival. Students utilize the same cues from teachers.

As children get older, what they fear may change. While younger children might fear the dark or scary monsters, older kids will shift to current events, like Covid-19, car accidents, or a family member being hurt. Our kids are always paying attention to what we discuss as adults and they sense what we are afraid of. Too much unmonitored time watching the news or being on social media without the context of feeling safe by having a discussion with their parents or teachers may increase children's fears by contributing to uncertainty and feeling unprotected.

Children will process fear depending on their age, the intensity and duration of exposure to a threat or image, and context. As adults do, children will use a variety of coping behaviors when dealing with a fearful event. Children may want to cuddle more or be clingy, try to take control of the situation by asking questions to understand, or cry and disengage. They reach for reassurance or safety by turning to a familiar face or favorite stuffed animal – all normal responses.

Although fear has been described by some researchers as a “childish emotion” that must be repressed in order to be considered mature, fear is not an emotion: it's a sensory and an evolutionary response that generates emotions. Fear is a brain and body phenomenon that connects our internal and external experiences to keep us safe. When a mother scares her child by screaming at him to not run out into traffic, the combination of being startled by her voice and actions will generate a fear memory (utilizing his senses, inner feelings, and being startled) that will be retained and direct him to look both ways when crossing the street. Now jump back thousands of years, and replace “traffic” with a hungry lion, and fear response begins to make a lot of sense.