Changing the Environment to Improve the Outlook

An Interview with Council Member Nathan A. Fox

Won’t children outgrow this problem, as they become more accustomed to new people and experiences?

In a word: no. Across early childhood there is a good deal of continuity of this temperamental fearfulness. Although all children show a little bit of wariness, the degree of fear shown by the children we study is much greater. It’s not unusual for a one-year-old child to show wariness when meeting an unfamiliar adult, but that wariness generally wears off if the parent is around and introduces the child to new experiences. However, in the children we’re concerned about, the wariness does not wear off. The children we identified early in infancy, the ones with this temperament, continued to be fearful in different settings, as they got older. Interestingly, a deeper understanding of the complexity of issues could relieve the guilt a parent of an anxious child may experience, and give the parent some power to encourage positive change. Yes, our study tells the parent that these dispositions or temperaments are most likely the result of genetics, but that having this disposition is not destiny. While a parent cannot control the initial genetic factor, the parent and the community can do quite a bit to help the child overcome fearfulness, or keep this genetic predisposition from being expressed in the first place.

What can health care providers do?

They can help parents by asking questions about the range of a child’s activities—whether the child goes to other children’s homes, how the child does when confronted with unfamiliar situations, whether the child has unusual fear of certain things. From the answers to those questions, the health care provider can pretty much gather if this is a temperamentally fearful child. It’s important to look at the child within the context of the family and the community. In our study, we asked each mother such questions as, did she have friends she could rely on? Did she feel stressed in terms of work, home situation, and childcare? If a child lives in a home beset by poverty or violence, one might speculate that the child’s fearfulness is unlikely to be alleviated unless that environment is changed. Ultimately, temperamentally fearful children are helped only by consistent, positive experiences that build a healthy base for sturdy brain architecture.

Regarding policy, should there be training programs for teachers and parents to identify fearful children? Should this science be distilled into a form that could be incorporated into Lamaze classes?

The social competence of children is as important as literacy skills. A child who is extremely fearful and unable to form good relationships with other kids in preschool or early elementary school, that child is on a path of problems that affect anxiety and social relationships. A child is going to be much better off with earlier interventions.

What is the primary message that parents, health providers, teachers and policy makers should take away from your work?

The message is that we as a society must recognize these important differences in our children early on. Parents or teachers or neighbors who notice that a particular child is fearful and anxious can help. They need to understand that there are things they can do to help that child avoid the negative consequences that are often the result of extreme fearfulness and anxiety. They can help by gradually exposing the child to unfamiliar and novel events. They can help by not being overprotective of the child, but by also making sure that the child does not get into a situation of being bullied or ignored within the peer group. These are all things that knowledgeable parents and teachers of a temperamentally fearful and anxious child can do.

But this requires training, and it requires access to health experts who can help put that child on a positive trajectory. Health care providers must be able to identify these characteristics in children at an early age, and then intervene effectively. By this, I don’t necessarily mean medical intervention, but psychological and social intervention—providing such assistance as social skill groups to help these children learn to interact with other children. These interventions can reduce a child’s fearfulness and anxiousness. If we moderate the environments that surround these children, the outcomes improve dramatically.

The interviewer: Richard Louv is the author of seven books about family, community and nature, including “Last Child in the Woods” (Algonquin). He is a Visiting Scholar at The Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University.

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