Recently, parents brought (actually more like dragged) their 8 year old child into my clinic in Beit Shemesh. The child had obviously not wanted to come to see me. All I knew from the initial phone conversation was that the boy had some fears at night.
I met the parents outside and I told them in a loud enough voice that the child could hear, that it was okay if the child hung around just outside my office and that he could come in to either play with some toys, or if he was very curious about what his parents would be talking about him.
We left the boy outside, of course after a couple of minutes he walked in. At this point I had just asked the parents what it was that their child was afraid of when he walked in….
Almost in a whisper, the father told me that the boy was afraid of robbers.
I turned to the boy who was pretending to be busy but listening intently to what was going on, and said in a clear sounding voice..
”So you are scared of robbers?”
“Yes” the boy answered with a very affirmative nod as if he had been waiting his entire life for someone to ask him this question.
“What does this robber that you are afraid of look like”? I asked
“He is very short” he responded
“Short? How come?” I asked
“The robber can only fit through the window if he is short”
“What kind of clothes does the robber wear?” I asked intrigued
“…he wears big brown boots a purple suede jacket and he has lots of pimples on his face”
At this point I took a look at the parents - they were sitting there with their mouths hanging open. Obviously, they had never considered that the robber in their child’s mind would look any different to the ones that they imagine.
The child in the meantime was so excited that he was given the opportunity to speak out about what had been going on in his mind for all that time, that he couldn’t be stopped and he went on to tell us more and more.
Too often parents do not feel like they are equipped enough to deal with their child’s fears, so they end up trying to convince the child that their fears are unfounded, that really “there are no robbers in this country only far far away”.
The most important need for a child is to feel secure. A child who has a creative imagination will imagine scary things and begin to feel insecure, it does not make sense to attempt to convince the child that the fear does not exist, trying to placate them if you are not even fully aware of what the specific fear is or what it looks like and means to your child.
Besides for the fact that once the parents realize that the robber the child had been imagining is straight out of a comic book, they can then automatically deal with it more confidently. And that is what matters more than anything in any attempt to cure any fears. The parent needs to come across to the child with fool proof confidence that it is going to be okay.
This blog was taken from the link http://www.menachemschloss.com/2012/07/13/the-robber-in-your-childs-imagination/
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