Hello,
Ever wondered about the origin of fear. Is it something that we are born with or is it an acquired trait. When human babies are born they are not afraid of water, fire, electricity, darkness or anything for that sake. The reason is that they haven’t yet experienced these things or elements. So how is it that after experiencing these elements that a person, a child becomes afraid of them. Basically it depends on the experience. Our brain records all experiences and seggregates them into two broad categories: the pleasant one and the unpleasant ones.
So how does a child’s first experience with water be either pleasant or unpleasant. It depends on the physical condition and the actions of the older human being trying to induce that experience. For example if a mother tries to bathe her newborn with cold water in a cold weather the newborn will experience discomfort and will become afraid of water because his brain will associate water with that discomfort irrespective of the temperature of water in other instance. Thus we have successfully induced the fear of water in a newborn who was born fearless. Small fears like this can be overcome by the child in later stages of growth depending on the different experiences he has with water. On the other hand it can be converted to a bigger fear if the mother had somehow managed to drown the baby in water for a time frame where he was able to survive but had to go through the trauma of being unable to breath for those few seconds.
Thus fear is not something that we are born with. Have you ever thought about the impact a fear might have on the way you live your life. Well it plays a huge part in your choice of lifestyle and maybe even your career. So is it not the responsibility of our parents and caretakers to make us fearless , thus increasing our ability to lead a better or maybe different life. Small actions taken by us for our own comfort might impact the way the our child is able to live in his later years.
Take for an instance a scenario where a child of say sixteen months is made to sleep in a nursery rather then with parents. At night the mother tells the child that he needs to sleep now or else the ghost would appear. The child goes to sleep but not because he has to sleep by that time but because he is afraid now that if he doesn’t sleep the ghost might come and take him away from his parents with whom he is secure. This is psychological conditioning where the child is conditioned to be afraid. If alternatively his mother had told him that he needs to sleep because he requires to rest before starting another fun filled exciting day,the child would have gone to sleep without any fear but would have taken another ten minutes of mother’s time by asking her about what happens tomorrow.
So it is small thoughtless things like this done by us grownups which condition the human mind in our care and thus impact a human life. Ever wondered why you are afraid of moving from one state to another or one job to another or one career to another. Something must have happened in your growing up years to induce that fear in you. So while there are different ways of overcoming our fears that we have lived with in so many years of our life , lets not repeat the cycle and make another child afraid…………. 🙂
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