Experiencing play as an antidote to fear

I'm a believer in coincidence having nothing to do with coincidence.  So the other evening, watching a loon family chugging across the pond, I took note of the fact I expected an adult loon to dive with the baby. 

I was practicing a doubly dangerous form of anthropomorphic thinking: first, I was indeed assigning human instinct and emotion to birds, and second my "parental" instinct was largely incorrect.

I laughed at myself almost immediately, because—as "coincidence" would have it—I am in the midst of reading Barbara Brown Taylor's excellent new book, Learning to Walk in the Dark (http://harperone.hc.com/barbarabrowntaylor) and also drafting an article about the work of Angela Hanscom, an occupational therapist with a really good idea (http://www.balancedandbarefoot.com/about-angela).

Both of these women are addressing fear.  Ms. Brown is tackling the existential darkness and how to deal with it when it comes.  Ms. Hanscom is suggesting a means for dealing with early inklings of that larger darkness in children: falling, injury, and how that fear can keep a kid from developing in many and unexpected ways.

Perhaps where they meet is in parents.  An excellent and brilliant friend once told me—before I had children or even thought about it—that he would not have children because of the enormity of the emotional burden and risk.  Today I admire how insightful he was, without precise experience!
Fear of something happening to one's child becomes the number one fear in a parent's life.  And we all know how best to deal with that fear: Cage them!  Pad the cage.  Stay right beside it.

While we all know that this is not the right or possible approach, parents often fail to understand how they do cage their children with their words and actions.  It happens in a thousand little ways, from restricting their play ("Don't fall down!"  "Get down from there!"  "Dont...!") to instilling our own fears into them by corralling them, subtly letting them know that the world is a scary place, thus making it a scary place.  (A great source of information about this subject is Peter Gray’s blog, Freedom to Learn [http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn].)

So the loon: I would have dived with my chick because it's dark and dangerous down there under the water.  But the loon knows, instinctively, that the chick has to learn to dive by itself.  And I am forgetting, in that moment when I walk my child to the bus stop or the neighborhood store that children need to learn independence—or grow up dependent and fearful.  I need to let my child fall down so that she'll learn what that's like and not fear it.  I need to let him climb that tree so that he can figure out if he's afraid of heights, if climbing things is fun.  And, in falling and climbing and swimming and running and jumping and hanging and spinning, my children learned not to fear those things and the feelings that came with them.

So they learn to deal with little fears and darknesses, which will help them deal, we hope, with bigger ones later on.  Ms. Brown's thesis is, in part, that it is by experiencing darkness in its various forms that we come to some comfort with it and so are able learn from it.

Ms. Hanscom, meanwhile, also knows that without being allowed to indulge in the risk-taking behavior to which children seem naturally drawn, serious developmental issues can result.  Without falling, spinning, tumbling, and rolling, a child's brain—in particular, the vestibular system—will not be able to cope with stimuli later on.  The result can be anything from clumsiness to an inability to read.

As parents, then, we are doubly challenged.  We have to find a balance between allowing our children to play and protecting them from real hazards, while at the same time living with and coming to terms with our own fears of loss.  In sitting with those fears and allowing our children the freedoms they need, we are parenting them and ourselves.