Helping Children Face their Fears

I saw a mother who was trying to support her child starting weekend school .

So here in Montreal we do have many cultures and languages , so there's Italian school that my kids attend , and this mother had a child who was about five years old , crying , not wanting to go to Italian schools a new environment , new friends , new teacher and the mother just kept telling her daughter like look , look , your teacher's nice , but this person was a

stranger , obviously . And telling her like there's really nothing for you to be afraid of right now . You're in a safe environment . Everything came from such a good place , and I'm not judging this .

I've done it myself in some moments , especially desperate moments , but I wanted to reevaluate and go through the steps with you in terms of what we could do a little bit differently .

When our child is scared , obviously there's moments when you have to bring them somewhere or something happens and you can't like do a whole one hour thing with them in that moment , in that moment , but you can use these moments to teach them what to do for the next one .

So that's what we're going to talk about today what do you do when your child is fearful of something in order to help them not be fearful and actually build this resilience for later on ? First , I would like to thank the Taninbaum Open Science Institute here at the Nuro in Montreal for supporting the Kyrstenon podcast .

Without them , this would not exist , so thank you . I also want to thank our other sponsors that support us . Poc Poc Playroom is an app . It was the first app , actually , that I installed on an iPad for my kids when they were young , and the only reason why I installed this app is because it was open ended , which I love .

Open ended play it's not telling you what to do , you discover it and that's like pretend play , which I know is amazing for kids . And also it wasn't overstimulating , the sounds weren't annoying to me and it wasn't kind of getting my kids all excited at the end . And I'm so happy that they are part of this Kyrstenon family and they support what I do .

You can get 50% off your first year . I'm also very grateful that better help is one of our sponsors as well . I had a mother reach out to me and send me an email this week and she said that everything I've spoken about through Kyrstenon about working on yourself first finally makes sense .

She joined BetterHelp and through therapy this was her first time in therapy she wanted to really take the time to take care of herself . Something had happened at home and she realized she needed a bit more support and through the therapy she saw a change in her child's behavior and a change in their relationship .

So it was only by changing her perspective through her therapy which is everything I say that she really saw a big difference and her stress levels have gone down . Her anxiety has gone down . So she that emailed me to thank me and it was a beautiful email that actually brought me to tears and I wanted to share that with you .

So you could get 15% off your first month with BetterHelp if you click the link in the bio , and you also get the link in the bio for Poc Poc . Last but not least , I do want to ask you to subscribe to the Kyrstenon podcast if you are not , and to leave a rating and review either on Spotify or Apple podcasts .

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So if you're a child , or even if you're a teacher , if your child struggles with big emotions and you want a printable that you could place on the wall with some science to back it up and help you understand why you need to do certain things , then just send me an email .

All right , so , like I said , there was this mom that really triggered this idea for the podcast . You know , I thought it would be a good idea to talk about being fearful in kids and it also reminded me of something that I did with my own children , or specifically my daughter , when she was around three years old .

We joined a community center and I remember her feeling very shy and fearful to speak to these educators that were at the community center . I was also part of this , so I was there with her and she just refused to even approach these educators .

Some of the children did approach and others were also very were feeling very shy and didn't want to approach them , and I had to remind myself that it's not easy . It's a lot of things that our kids are fearful about , including the dark , or going to bed , or I'm afraid of having a nightmare , or afraid of a stranger or a new person in their life .

It seems ridiculous sometimes to us and it's like there's really nothing to be afraid of , but us saying that to them , to them doesn't really help them or teach them the skills that they need for resilience and we all want our kids to be resilient .

But then we have to make sure that we implement these in our daily lives and in situations so that they do build that resilience . So when it comes to a child feeling fearful or feeling shy , which is part of feeling fearful , you know we have to give them some sort of strategy . What I did with my daughter Is we first acknowledged it .

It was okay , there was nothing wrong with Not wanting to go say hi in that moment because this teacher was new , and so what we did is , um , you know , first kind of acknowledge it , and I'm also going to share with you I I've brought up this book before , the . It's called emotional agility by Dr Susan David and she breaks it down really beautifully .

So after I give you this example , I will break it down through her words , which I think are really helpful . Um . So , going back to my daughter's situation , what what I did with her is first , acknowledged that the emotions were okay . I didn't want her to feel bad for feeling fearful . I didn't want her to feel Like feeling shy was a label on her .

I never said you're shy , oh , stop being shy , don't be so shy . Um , I said it's okay to feel shy or it's okay to feel afraid of somebody new . Um , but let's try to find ways to make it easier on ourselves , and that's what we called baby steps . My daughter and I created and she was three at the time we created the sort of uh , a game plan . What ?

What is the game plan ? The end goal of this for us was to eventually go say hi to the teacher when she walked into the classroom and giving her a hug , whatever . My daughter felt comfortable with it , whether it was a high five , a hug , um , whatever it was , it ended up being a hug for her . She wanted to hug her teacher .

So it's not that she didn't want to , but in that moment she just was afraid to do it . And , um , so the baby steps that we created Were first , when we would walk into the classroom together , my daughter would smile at the teacher . So we did that for one or two no , actually two or three weeks . And then we created that .

We decided that the next step would be to wave and to Sit a little bit closer to the teacher when we had circle time , and we did that once she was able to smile and and have eye contact . When we walk in and say hi to the teacher , I would tell her hey , I noticed , you did it . You smiled at her and did you see what your teacher did ?

She smiled right back at you . How did that feel ? She's like good , she's really . She seems really kind . And so what we did is , once she felt comfortable with that step , she decided to move on to the next one because she knew what the next step was . The next step was to so sit a little bit closer to wave at her , and she did that .

And once she felt comfortable at that step or that level , then we moved on to the next step and we sat beside her at circle time . No contact if she didn't want to , but she would definitely smile at her and Sit beside her very comfortably .

And when she did that , then the next step was to have some sort of High-five or to speak to her , and she did that . So we moved on step by step until we got to her end goal . It's so easy as parents to want to move things forward more quickly . It's harder , obviously , to take more time . And then there's the pressure . Sometimes .

I'm lucky that that teacher in particular this community center , didn't place any pressure on my daughter and this led to them having a very good relationship .

And If I would have had pressure from that teacher or that educator to kind of push things forward a little faster , in the end the whole process took about five or six weeks , but my daughter was able to feel comfortable and also to trust her instincts right like somebody knew .

Is not somebody that she wanted to be super open with and have that physical touch of a hug or even a high five ? And I'm okay with that as a parent , because if I think of myself as an adult right now , I'm not going to jump into your arms . Am I seeing you for the first time ?

I'm probably going to be a little bit more reserved than I usually am and a little quieter . I'm an introvert . I'm comfortable with that . I'm so socially awkward sometimes , but that's who I am and what's interesting is I've become comfortable with that and also have found ways to move past those sort of social fears that I had .

My social fears were so intense as a child . I remember , when I would have oral presentations , the nausea that I had the morning of the stomach aches , not wanting to go to school , sometimes finding reasons not to go to school , to be honest , and that it didn't really get any better with time . It wasn't a matter of waiting it out .

Nobody gave me steps , nobody told me what to do . I was just a very shy child and hated speaking in front of people because what were they thinking of me ? Did I say something wrong ? Was something off on my I don't know my face , my hair , my shoe ? Did I step on something ?

I would have a million and one reasons in my head that I looked ridiculous standing in front of the class . And it's interesting because I think of myself . Now I do public speaking . I stand in front of hundreds of people , sometimes in person , and I can do this on Zoom as well and I'm comfortable in both scenarios .

There is no more of that sort of worry or fear . But I've had to find ways to move past that , even this podcast , if you haven't been around very long . What happened is that I recorded the first episode of this podcast and it took me one year to publish the first episode of the podcast because I thought I didn't have the radio voice .

I thought that my accent was ridiculous and annoying and that I didn't say certain words the way that I should or that I didn't have the right you know pauses at the right time , like radio people do . But it took me one year to let it out . And now when I publish , I do these solo episodes and what you're hearing now is a one big episode .

There is no editing and I used to not be able to do that at all . Saying hi , welcome to the Cures Neuron podcast took me six , seven edits because I didn't like the way I said it . I'd said it too quickly , I said it too slowly , the pause was at the wrong time . We get into our heads and Dr Susan David's book uses the term hooked .

We get hooked onto certain stories that we tell ourselves , or an emotion or a feeling , and the same thing happens with our kids . If we can understand these much better in ourselves , then we can support our child a lot better as well .

So Dr Susan David , in her book Emotional Agility , uses the example of her son not wanting to jump off the diving board and being fearful of jumping off a diving board at the public pool . And he was there with his friends and all his friends were jumping , you know , going off the , going on to the diving board and jumping off into the pool and having fun .

And her son would be looking at them and she could tell that he wanted to , and it would have been so easy for her to say there's clearly nothing to be afraid of , they're not getting hurt , right , you just do it , just go . And we often do that as parents .

But I want us to kind of question that a little bit more , to give our child that sort of power to fear , to feel fearful , right , because we don't want them to push that sort of feeling to the side . We don't want them to think that there isn't any validity in them feeling fearful because there is .

It's an important way of their brain kind of communicating this to themselves . We don't want them to also kind of be frozen in life because of their fear . But we want to approach it in a way that we give them that power to feel that fear and then teach them how to move past it . And here's what she says . First , I love this sentence .

She said I encouraged him to show up to his fear . And that's sort of when I think back to what I did with my daughter . I let her know that it was OK , I acknowledged her feelings of shyness and feeling fearful . To speak to the teacher , I didn't shame her or label her for having these emotions . And that's what we want to do with our kids .

We want them to have this sort of safe space to be able to experience all emotions and to show them that all emotions are a form of communication . We don't want to push sadness away . We don't want to push anxiety or fear like feeling fearful away .

They're all very important emotions because they're telling us something , but we want to be able to learn how to read them and understand them and , like I said before , move past them .

So she said , simply acknowledging what he was feeling changed Noah that's her son , noah's relationship with his fear , allowing him to then step out to create a dispassionate distance between the emotion and what he wanted to accomplish .

This meant distancing himself from both the physical effects of his fear the cortisol surge , the accelerated heart rate and the hyperventilation and from any self-doubting narratives that might have already hooked him at his tender age Right .

So these narratives of him possibly looking like a fool , making a splash in a way that he wouldn't want , or doing a belly flop , or whatever the fear was , she calls those hooks , and those hooks allow us to or stop us from moving forward and get us stuck in those moments that we can't move past .

And what she did in particular with her son is she helped him turn the focus away from the outcome . So the outcome was about jumping off the diving board . That was the end goal that he had . But we don't even need to talk about the end goal .

See , I spoke about the end goal with my daughter , but I love the way the Dr Susan David kind of flips this around . So she turned the focus away from the outcome and turned the focus towards the process . What was the process ? What are the skills that he wanted to learn and how could they break these skills into small steps ?

So that part is very similar to what I did with my daughter , where it was about we had the end goal in mind and we said how do we break it down into baby steps ? We call them baby steps and that really worked with my daughter at three years old , and this is what I love about Dr Susan David's book , where she talks about towards the process .

So for her son , he really did want to learn how to jump off the diving board , and so that is what she did with him . First it was about just walking up to the diving board and standing at the top .

It didn't matter if he didn't go to the edge , that he just stayed at the stairs , but just walking up the stairs to the top of the ladder , all the way up on the diving board , and what he did inevitably was walking right back down . But that didn't matter because that was part of the process . He was showing up to his fear and acknowledging it .

He wasn't avoiding it and he was creating small steps to learn what he wanted to learn . The process of learning how to jump off the diving board were broken down into these baby steps , and what I also love is she talks about examining your child's why right , and his why was about joining his friends and having fun jumping off the diving board .

And her son , I believe at that time was eight years old . So if you do have an older child taking the time to sit down and saying so , you want to go play hockey , but you're afraid , right , you don't want to . I just realized I'm so Canadian . I came up with hockey as an example .

Anyways , you know , if your child wants to play hockey and they're afraid of being the worst one , right ? I hear this from parents where their child isn't really motivated or feeling fearful of a lot of things and they don't want to move forward or pass that .

If your child has that already and they're voicing what their why is that they want to have fun with the other kids and play hockey or whatever the sport is then use that as their motivation . Now , bringing up their why , as Dr David talks about .

It's not that it'll make them less afraid or more motivated , but it just helps them to kind of unhook from that thought of I'm going to , you know , fail this or I'm not good enough . So if your child is often saying that these are such great steps to take with them in order to get past that or , as Dr David says , to get unhooked .

There's also this other great line that I wanted to share with you , and she talks about acknowledging your fear . Yet distancing yourself from the emotion by connecting to your why teaches you to unhook despite your fear . So you're not avoiding the fear altogether .

Truly , you are acknowledging it , but now that you've acknowledged it , you need to create a space , a distance , and when you create this distance , you can see things a little bit more clearly . And this is advice not just for our kids , but for ourselves .

If we are afraid to speak up to somebody or to set a sort of boundary or to whatever it is , even if we have a fear of public speaking and we have to give a talk at work , we can also do the same thing and take the same steps where we are acknowledging the fear , but now trying to unhook from the whatever story we are telling ourselves .

And there are baby steps that we can take for this , and the same thing applies for our kids . So , whatever it is your child is fearful of , can you create these baby steps , can you focus on the process with them , or perhaps you can focus on the goal . It worked for me and my daughter as well .

But breaking it down in baby steps allows your child to see that there will always be things that they are afraid of . There will always be something that you want to do . I don't want to do it . Same thing for me . I hate vaccines , I hate needles . I hate the dentists Sorry , dentists . I just there are lots of things .

My kids laugh because I'm fearful of a lot of things . But you know , looking back , I never took the time to or learned all of these methods and we can give that to our kids now . We can help them create these baby steps when they're young , and even kind of expressed baby steps for our own fears , if we have them to model this for them .

So taking the time to show them that we can break down any example or anything that they are fearful of into baby steps really helps them when they're older and then they can do this on their own and that is what's going to help them build resilience .

And with this , my dear parents , I want to encourage you this week to do something that you would technically be afraid to do . What is it that you can set as a goal for yourself and create these baby steps ? Can you focus on the outcome or focus on the process ? And whichever one it is , can you break it down into baby steps ?

Have you been wanting to say something to somebody that you have been so fearful of ? Have you been wanting to be honest about something with your partner , with your boss , with a friend , with a family member that you've been afraid of or not wanting to do , for whatever reason it is ? Let's give it a try , shall we ?

We are in the process , with our children , of developing our own emotional awareness and developing these skills , because many of us were not taught how to do this when we were young . So now that the science is out there , why not learn it with them and grow with them so that we could be stronger and build a stronger relationship and model this for our kids ?

So if you do so , let me know . Send me an email at infoicurisnearoncom . I'm just curious to know if you will give yourself this challenge this week . You don't have to tell me what it is , but just say hey , cindy , I did it . Thank you for listening to the Curious Neuron podcast .

This was a short episode and it's because I know that many of you don't have time to listen to the podcast and are busy doing other things , but I do want to take a moment to thank you for listening to the Curious Neuron podcast , as I sit here in my basement as always at night , you know recording this podcast .

I see the numbers of you downloading the podcast and I see the numbers growing and for that I am forever grateful that you are here listening to me . I don't know how you're still here . I am really happy that you are here and I hope that you are indeed growing and developing that emotional awareness along with your child .

I have one little resource for you If you are looking for more for your child . As you know , I am the co-founder of WonderGrade and we are now creating free monthly no , not monthly weekly free weekly PDFs that focus on supporting your child's emotions and giving them the language and the words that they need .

There's also print coloring pages and things that they can cut out and glue and have fun doing .

There are specific events in each PDF that you get , so , for example , if your child's afraid of the dark , or if your child is feeling worried about the first day of school or kindergarten or daycare , whatever it is , every single Friday is a new situation where Ali , the character of WonderGrade , experiences and moves past and this can help your child .

It's all free . The link will be in the show notes . You can click on the WonderGrade play and learn bundle and get it every single Friday for free in your inbox . Thank you for supporting the Curious Neuron podcast and Curious Neuron as a whole . You can visit our website , curisneuroncom .

Visit us on Instagram , curious underscore neuron and also I'm going to put it out there If anybody is out there listening we are looking for bigger partners to join Curious Neuron .

So if you know of any organization or have one yourself where you want to kind of support the work that we're doing here at Cure , that I'm doing here at Curious Neuron , I need to grow the team of graduate students , but I want to continue offering the podcast and social media and the articles on the website for free .

But I want to grow the team of graduate students who are learning how to translate science . We have some interns right now that are working , but I'd love to create more positions for these students .

So , whether you are a graduate student and you want to join or , if you , like I said , you have an organization and you'd love to fund part of what we're doing or join us or collaborate in some way . Please send me an email at info at Curious Neuroncom . Let's grow this mission together of supporting parental well being and their mental health .

I think there's not enough out there for parents and that is why I've shifted what I do so much with Curious Neuron . I'm still talking about your kids and still helping you help them and understand them , but underlying all of that is helping you understand yourself , to become more emotionally aware , and if you want to join this , please send me an email .

Thank you everyone . I hope you have a wonderful and a beautiful week . Bye .