​The Fear Factor

When the world becomes a scary place for your baby, how can you help him to cope with his fears?

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As a child grows older and explores more things around him, he is bound to confront new challenges and feel more apprehensive about the world. Fear is defined as a human response to a perceived or real threat. While fear and anxiety are negative feelings that make us feel uncomfortable, they are in fact helpful and necessary for humans to cope with new experiences and to stay safe.

According to the Child Anxiety Network, the most common fears among children aged 0 to 2 are that of loud noises, strangers, separation from parents, and large objects; children from ages 3 to 6 tend to be more afraid of imaginary things such as ghosts, monsters, strange noises, and the dark. The types of fears of the different age groups can be explained by the changes in the physiology and environment of a growing child.

Let’s take a closer look at the fears experienced by children aged 0 to 2:

FEAR OF LOUD NOISES

Loud noises from flushing toilets, thunder, trains or vacuum cleaners can startle young children. Most of the time, the fear of loud noises stems from the lack of knowledge about the sound – where the sound comes from and why it is present. As the child grows and is able to understand and identify the sound, he will then feel more in control and the fear will disappear.

In some cases, children fear loud noises not because of the sound itself but because of the related event or circumstance. For example, some children are afraid of the sound of vacuum cleaners because they have seen the vacuum cleaner at work, and they fear that the machine would swallow them up as well. The sound of the vacuum cleaner may serve as a cue that the ‘noisy eating machine’ is out to get them. Thus, the child associates the loud noise with something negative and develops a fear for the sound.