A Simple Way To Protect Kids from Fear

A fascinating insight from the research.

Over the past month, for my book research, I’ve been talking with researchers who study anxiety and the various ways it can get passed from parents to kids. Anxiety is increasingly common among U.S. adults, including if not especially among parents, and there are many ways anxious parents unwittingly pass along their predilections for worry and rumination — which is likely one reason why anxiety symptoms are on the rise in kids, too.

The problem is, so much of what we pass along to our kids do unconsciously. Sure, we can try to quell our anxious impulses, but we can only go so far. Even if we don’t outwardly talk about our worries, children can still learn a lot from our behavior, body language, and facial expressions, which are hard to control. Research finds that kids learn a lot about what to be afraid of by observing how other people, including their parents, act in various situations — and they start doing this before their first birthday.

I’m quite sure that my kids pick up on my anxieties in various ways: in how I talk about germs, my stance and behavior when I enter crowded spaces, and because I totally lose my mind whenever anyone meanders within ten feet of a drop-off or cliff edge.

This photo is giving me hives.

But I was amazed to uncover from the research — and from my interviews with experts — that there is something simple that parents can do to help protect their kids from fears: We can try to engineer our kids’ first few exposures to scary things so that they happen around people who don’t show fear. Just a few initial “neutral” observations like this help protect kids from fears even if they see people acting terrified in similar situations in the future.

Put another way: If you’re deathly afraid of something, but, say, your partner or a friend is not, you can protect your child against that fear by ensuring that their first few exposures to the potentially scary thing happen around your partner or your friend rather than you.

Obviously, this is not something all families can accomplish. There’s a lot of privilege (not to mention luck) required to engineer the company in which one’s kids are exposed to potentially scary things and situations. But I think it sometimes can be done, so it’s worth keeping in mind. (It’s also worth mentioning that if you can’t or don’t do this, it doesn’t mean your kid *will* develop anxiety about something you’re scared of. There are lots of factors involved, including temperament!)

The landmark study that illustrates the power of this approach, which is known as “immunization against fear learning,” was conducted by psychologists Susan Minetka and Michael Cook while they were at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In the study, published in 1986, the researchers split a group of rhesus monkeys into three groups.

One group of monkeys watched other monkeys interacting non-fearfully with snakes over the course of six sessions. A second group watched other monkeys interacting non-fearfully with other neutral objects for six sessions. And a third group interacted with snakes on their own in non-fearful ways for the same amount of time.

Next, all the monkeys watched other monkeys interacting fearfully with snakes for six more sessions. They wanted to know: Would any of the initial exposures protect the monkeys against the fears they were observing?

When the researchers tested how scared these monkeys then seemed around snakes, they found that the monkeys who’d first observed other monkeys engaging non-fearfully with snakes were less likely than all the other monkeys to show snake-related fear. Studies involving people have had similar findings, including one study in 2016 that concluded that “observational preexposure can limit social transmission of fear.”

As I already implied, I’m deathly afraid of heights. My husband, however, is not. So, based on this research, it makes sense for him to take the kids on steep mountain hikes while I stay home — both for my own enjoyment (whenever they get near a cliff, I nearly have a heart attack) and for the sake of my kids (not only do they enjoy hiking more without me there freaking out, but my absence likely helps to immunize them against a future fear of heights).

And again, the amazing thing about this research is that these initial neutral exposures seem to persist even in the face of contradictory experiences down the line. Once kids have had the initial “immunization” by being around someone who’s not fearful, “it's very difficult to transmit anxiety afterwards,” said Evin Aktar, a psychologist at Leiden University in the Netherlands who studies the transmission of anxiety from parents to kids.

Since my kids have repeatedly seen my husband fearlessly navigate steep climbs, they are unlikely to be fazed in the future when they see me lose my shit when I am close to a cliff edge. They’ll probably think something like “Oh, silly mom, she’s so irrational,” rather than “Gosh, mom is afraid — maybe I should be, too.”

What are your thoughts on this approach? Have you managed to do this with your kids, or not? Share in the comments!