The Emotional Life of the Toddler by Alicia F. Lieberman

Author:Alicia F. Lieberman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

7

Early Anxieties

Human beings have a deeply ingrained capacity to anticipate and respond to danger. We respond to present and immediate danger with fear. We respond to dangers that we anticipate or imagine with anxiety. Anxiety anticipates, fear responds. Both emotions are related because an imagined danger can materialize very quickly. Both fear and anxiety have a subjective component because we must interpret an event as being safe or dangerous (a process that takes milliseconds). During the early years, while children are learning about what is safe and what is dangerous, anxiety and fear are often indistinguishable because they occur not only in relation to objective danger but also in relation to unfamiliar or unexpected events. The role of parents—not always fulfilled—is to provide a “protective shield” that enables the child to feel safe when anticipating and responding to real or perceived danger. The gifted cartoonist Gary Larson provided a poignant illustration of this psychological process on the first page of his book The Far Side Gallery 4, in which he wrote, “When I was a boy, our house was filled with monsters. They lived in the closets, under the beds, in the attic, in the basement, and—when it was dark—just about everywhere. This book is dedicated to my father, who kept me safe from all of them.”1

Larson evokes in this description Selma Fraiberg’s seminal concept of “the magic years,” which she described as follows:

The magic years are the years of early childhood. By “magic” I do not mean that the child lives in an enchanted world where all the deepest longings are satisfied. [The child’s] earliest conception of the world is a magical one; he believes that his actions and his thoughts can bring about events as the child gropes his way toward reason and an objective world he must wrestle with the dangerous creatures of his imagination and the real and imagined dangers of the outer world.2

Though it is unpleasant to experience, anxiety has an important role in survival because it serves as a signal of impending danger that gives us time to protect ourselves. The events that trigger anxiety are not always dangerous in themselves, but they get their emotional force from the fact that they often precede danger or are associated with it.3 For example, waking up to find ourselves alone in our darkened house is not dangerous in itself but can make us anxious if, like Gary Larson, we imagine unseen dangers lurking in the dark. If we turned on the light and saw actual danger, we would move quickly from feeling anxiety to feeling downright fear. Our anxiety is relieved when we find that nothing unusual is happening.

Anxiety is increased by helplessness and lack of knowledge, which makes babies and toddlers particularly prone to it. Very young children face an unfamiliar world that operates in unknown ways. They are small and vulnerable and rely on others to feel safe. Young children also do things that can have unpredictable and even frightening consequences, including making their parents angry at them.

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