By 3-1/2 or 4 years of age, fears accompany the beginning of normal aggression. Most children begin to have feelings of aggression at this age as part of growing up and of trying themselves out. The psychoanalyst Erik Erikson has described how aggressive feelings surface at 4 or 5 years. But, before they can be acknowledge or acted upon, they are boiling around inside. A child begins to experience complicated feelings when he sees a toy gun or when he imagines himself using one. When he wants to last out at someone but dares not, there aren’t too many ways to handle the feelings that keep coming to the surface. Fears help to keep them in check. Selma Fraiberg’s wonderful book, The Magic Years
An example illustrates this type of fear: “your child 3-1/2-old is suddenly afraid of everything
“. He’s fearful of fire engines and loud noises. He’s especially afraid of the dark and of going to bed alone. When his parents leave the house, he has to know where they are going, why, and who we will be with-and he like to hear them tell him over and over.
The children fears represented a period of rapidly learning about himself. He was learning what it was like to feel aggressive. This period in children’s lives always demand an extra adjustment. How will he learn to control his aggression? Learning about himself at such a time carries with it a price. As they become aware of new feelings, children fall into a kind of him balance in which they may become temporarily oversensitive to things and events around them. This increased sensitivity is likely to show up in the form of fearfulness or of expressed fears. These are an expression of the normal anxiety that goes with the reshuffling of one’s ideas and awareness of aggressive feelings. A child with fears can be seen as asking for help from those around him-help to see the limits of the new feelings as well as the limits of his own capacity to deal with the situation.
Acknowledgment of guilty feelings and feelings of turmoil seems too risky, so the children express himself in his fears. His fear allowed him to regress to a more helpless state, through which he could gather in longed-for attention from his parents. As he did this, he projected all of these frightening aggressive feelings on something’s outside of himself. He then could be afraid of aggression in others around him.
Fears and aggressive dreams are an expression of healthy development in the 4-6-year-old child. If parents respect them and are reassuring and protective, they can help the child learn about this phase of development in himself.
Watch a Video and Learn About the Anxiety Child Program
Please also read my article about How to Understand Fears in a Small Children
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