3 Tips For Helping Your Child Work Through A Fear

All children have fears. Whether this fear is something common, like being afraid of the dark, or something that’s less common, your child nonetheless needs your help and support if they’re going to learn how to manage this fear and any other fears they develop in their life. And while some fears can be dealt with, like calling a pest control company to help with your child’s fear of bugs, other fears will have to be handled more subtly. 

To help you figure out the best way to help your child with any fear they might be trying to cope with, here are three tips for helping your child work through a fear.

Validate The Fear 

As soon as you learn that your child has a certain fear, Rae Jacobson, a contributor to ChildMind.org, shares that the very first thing you should do is to validate your child’s fear. Even if it’s something that is completely illogical to you, your child needs to know that you’re taking their fear seriously and aren’t judging them for their fear. 

Once you’ve validated your child’s fear, it’s important that you then try to move on from focusing on the actual fear and start to find ways to manage that fear together. If you dwell too much on what’s making your child scared, it will usually only serve to make them more scared.

Help Your Child Manage Their Fear 

While you might think that overcoming their fear is your goal, what you should really be focusing on is teaching your child how to manage their fear. Because this isn’t going to be the only fear they have in life, and having some fear about certain things is normal and healthy, it’s really learning how to manage a fear without letting it debilitate you that you want your child to learn. 

To help them get to this point, Kate Kelly, a contributor to Understood.org, advises that you ask your child what they think might help them manage their fear. Since your child understands their fear much better than you do, taking their advice for how to cope might mean the fear gets managed much more effectively than if you tried to fix things yourself.

Gradually Increase Exposure 

If your child didn’t come up with this option all on their own, what you can do to help your child in managing their fear, according to Marie Hartwell-Walker, a contributor to PsychCentral.com, is to gradually increase your child’s exposure to their fear. As you do this, your child will slowly but surely learn how to handle themselves when in this scary situation and will gradually become less fearful when presented with what’s scaring them.  

If fear is crippling your child in one way or another, consider using the tips mentioned above to help your child learn how to work through this fear.