# 47. How Children Naturally Learn Courage and How We Can Help Them

In our, society, where children’s activities are so restricted, we may need special programs to assist Mother Nature.

Jul 23, 2024

Dear friends,

Mother Nature (the goddess of natural selection) endowed young mammals, including those young mammals we identify as our children, with a drive not just to play but to play in ways that involve degrees of danger. Animal behaviorists have observed this in essentially all mammalian species that have been studied. Goat kids leap and gallop along the edges of cliffs; young monkeys chase one another high up in trees and leap across wide gaps in the branches; young chimps have been observed climbing to the tops of trees and then dropping, only to catch themselves on a lower branch just before hitting the ground.

Why? What’s the value of such behavior, which, on the face of it, seems maladaptive? Here’s the answer evolutionary biologists have come up with. This is how young mammals develop courage. By doing things that are moderately dangerous and elicit symptoms of fear (such as a pounding heart, rapid breathing, and trembling muscles) youngsters learn they can handle fear.

They learn they can feel the symptoms of fear and not fall apart either emotionally or physically. This is an extraordinarily valuable lesson, because all of us—us goats, monkeys, chimps, and humans—are going to face some real emergencies in our lives. If we have never practiced controlling fear, in the relatively safe context of play, where we ourselves control the activity and can quit if it is too frightening, then the first time we face a real emergency, or something we perceive to be one, we may fall apart. We may freeze in panic with results that could be tragic.

For more about common varieties of children’s risky play and what children learn from such play, see Letter #8. I add now that it is not just play, but all sorts of moderately frightening independent activities that help children develop courage.

How Clinical Psychologists Treat Phobias: Exposure Therapy

I turn now from Mother Nature’s world to the clinical world of therapy. Many people suffer from quite specific fears, called phobias. Among the most common of these are fear of heights (acrophobia), fear of spiders (arachnophobia), and fear of enclosed spaces (claustrophobia).

The standard way of treating such fears is exposure therapy. It involves exposing the client gradually to ever stronger samples of the feared stimulus or situation, over a series of sessions. For example, someone with arachnophobia might first look at pictures of spiders until the pictures elicit little or no fear, then at a spider enclosed in a terrarium until that elicits little or no fear, and so on, until finally the client is able to touch or pick up a harmless live spider with little or no fear. The rationale is that the experience of exposure to the feared stimulus or situation followed by no harmful consequence leads to extinction of the fear response to that stimulus or situation.

Evidence that Exposure Therapy Can Reduce Fears Unrelated to the Phobia Being Treated

A recent clinical experiment reported by Iris Kodzaga and colleagues (here) has stimulated thought about a new way of understanding exposure therapy. The study was designed to see if exposure treatment for one phobia would also result in reduction of another, seemingly unrelated phobia.

For their experiment, they recruited volunteers who suffered from two strong phobias—fear of spiders and fear of heights. (I would guess that these are people who somehow missed out on climbing trees and playing with bugs as kids.) The researchers assessed the degree of both fears in all the volunteers at the beginning of the experiment. Then they used standard exposure therapy to treat just the fear of spiders, not the fear of heights, in half of the volunteers (the other half were the control group). And, finally, they assessed all the volunteers again for degree of both fears at the end of the experiment.

The interesting and novel result was that treatment for fear of spiders resulted not just in a decline in that fear but also a significant decline in fear of heights, relative to the untreated control group.

What do spiders and heights have in common? Objectively, they have nothing in common. They are entirely different categories of things. But they did have one characteristic in common for these volunteers. They both, prior to treatment, elicited fear. They were both in the category of “things that make me afraid.” Maybe exposure therapy is doing something quite beyond reducing fear of a specific stimulus or situation. Maybe it is reducing fear of fear.

Here's a way to think about it. The volunteers exposed to spiders were not just learning that no harm followed their experience of spiders but were also learning that no harm followed their experience of fear. Their heart pounded and breathing rate increased, but they did not die. Nothing bad happened.

There is reason to believe that the greatest fear for people who suffer from a phobia, and especially for those who experience panic attacks, is fear of fear. The stimulus or situation causes symptoms of fear, and those symptoms themselves create more fear, experienced perhaps as feeling that one’s body and mind are failing. “I’m falling apart, losing control.” This, of course, results in even more fear symptoms, leading to still more fear, and then fear of that fear, a vicious spiral.

Here's an interesting way to think about courage. Courage is a reduced fear of fear. It is the ability to confront fear without that fear producing more fear, without that vicious spiral. The courageous fire fighter may be afraid of fire (in a rather healthy way) but is not afraid of the fear of fire and is also not afraid of the fear of other things.

So, when your daughter climbs that tree higher than you might want her to go, she is not only conquering a fear of heights but also conquering a fear of fear. She goes high enough that she feels some fear and learns that she can feel fear and keep herself together. She learns courage. The resulting courage, from this and other such experiences, allows her, as she goes through life, to deal effectively with all sorts of frightening situations without allowing the fear to mushroom.

Independence Therapy

Clinical psychologist Camilo Ortiz, a professor at Long Island University, has recently developed a new way of treating anxiety in children and teens that is quite different from standard exposure therapy. Instead of trying to get clients to do increasing amounts of whatever they are most afraid of, which they most definitely do not want to do, his approach is to invite them to do a set of things—independently, on their own—that they want to do but are a little afraid of. My way of thinking about this is that doing the mildly frightening but fun things leads the kids to develop courage and then, lo and behold, the courage allows them finally, on their own, to confront and overcome the original fear that brought them to therapy.

This new therapeutic approach is called independence therapy by some (e.g. here) but it might equally well be called courage therapy. It is a way of increasing the client’s courage, and once courage is great enough the client, on their own, may conquer a wide variety of previous fears. It is an approach completely consistent with Mother Nature’s method of motivating children to play and explore in all sorts of somewhat frightening ways. In a world where social forces fight Mother Nature by restricting children’s play and exploration, we may sometimes need to create situations in which kids are given permission, even instruction, to do what they want to do, what they would naturally do in a less restrictive world.

In a recent article in Journal of Anxiety Disorders, Ortiz and his graduate student Matthew Fastman describe an exploratory study in which they used this new technique with four children who presented with specific fears. In all four the treatment led to a reduction in the presenting fear, even though none of them were asked during treatment to confront that fear.

For example, one of the children was a 9-year-old girl who experienced fear related to any activity that involved separation from her parents. She was especially afraid of sleeping in her own room at night; she had slept in her parents’ room every night.

As treatment, she was first asked to brainstorm about activities she would like to do and felt she could do independently, without her parents. Of course, the parents had to agree to permit each activity that made the final list. Then the assignment was to engage in at least one such activity every day for a 6-week period. One of her activities, for example, was to take a city bus to school on her own. During the final week of treatment, the girl chose, on her own, with no prompting from anyone, to sleep in her own room through the night.

The Let Grow Experience

The idea that led Ortiz to develop independence therapy came originally from his connection with the nonprofit organization Let Grow. This organization, of which I am one of the founders and Lenore Skenazy is president, had for years been promoting a school intervention—developed by Lenore—called The Let Grow Experience. Teachers who adopt this intervention ask their students to engage in new independent out-of-school activities, of their own choosing, for which they must get parental permission, and report back about them in school. For example, a child who had never ridden her bicycle on her own, even around the block, might choose that as her project one week.

Anecdotal reports suggest that these activities improve children’s general confidence and courage. Some reports indicate that the children even become more courageous about speaking up in class.

But perhaps the most significant effect is on the parents. Parents, of course, have to agree to what the child chooses to do, and the child and parent may negotiate a compromise. But the genius of the program is that because this is a school assignment, parents feel compelled to take the child’s request seriously. When the child engages successfully in a new activity, the parents learn that their child is capable of more independent activities than the parents had previously allowed.

The project helps reduce not just children’s fears but also parents’ fears about allowing their children to do things on their own. Over time, parents’ fears are at least partly crowded out by pride in what their child can do. The reins loosen and the child becomes ever freer to play and explore in the ways that Mother Nature intended.

Final Thoughts

Of course, children vary genetically in their baseline degree of fearfulness. I speak from experience on this. As a kid I was by nature at the cautious end of the spectrum—or timid end, to use a more negative term—but fortunately I was a kid at a time when Mother Nature largely ruled. I could play and explore away from adults to my heart’s content, so I overcame many of my fears, often through the example and encouragement of bolder playmates. (In my book Free to Learn, I describe, for example, how my brave barely older friend Ruby Lou helped me overcome a fear of heights when I was five years old.) At the other end of the spectrum, I recall friends who were innately too bold for their own good. They suffered frequent accidents, including broken bones, and I think (or at least hope) their freedom taught them to be more cautious.

So, when you think about differences among kids in courage, realize that these derive not just from differences in opportunities for independent activities but also from differences in innate disposition. Your overly cautious kid may need more encouragement for independent activities and your too-bold kid may need some lessons in safety. But both gain from independent activities, as that is how they learn about their own abilities and vulnerabilities.

This Substack is, in part, a forum for thoughtful discussion. I greatly value readers’ contributions, even when they disagree with me, sometimes especially when they do. What contributions might you have, from your own experiences, to ideas about how children overcome fears and develop courage?

Play Makes Us Human

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