The best child in the world is liable to be full of fears; and the child who is full of fears deserves careful handling, in order that his fears may not gain permanent control of him. Fears are of a child’s very nature, and every child’s training must be in view of the fact that he has fears. How to deal wisely, firmly, and tenderly with a child’s fears is, therefore, one of the important practical questions in the training of a child.

To begin with, it should be understood that a child’s fears are no sign of a child’s weakness, but that, as a rule, the stronger a child is in the elements of a well-balanced and an admirable character, the more fears he will have to contend with in the exercise of his character. Hence a child’s fears are worthy of respect, and call for tenderness of treatment, instead of being looked at as a cause of ridicule or of severity on the part of those who observe them.

“Fear” is not “cowardice.” Fear is a keen perception of dangers, real or imaginary. Cowardice is a refusal to brave the dangers which the fears recognize. Fear is the evidence of manly sensitiveness. Cowardice is the exhibit of unmanly weakness. Fear is a moral attribute of humanity. Cowardice is a moral lack. A child, or a man, who is wholly free from cowardice, may have more fears than the veriest coward living. The one struggles successfully against his many fears; the other yields in craven submission to the first fear that besets him.

It is by no means to a child’s credit that it can be said of him, “He doesn’t know what fear is.” A child ought to know what fear is. He is pitiably ignorant if he does not. The same is true of the bravest man. It is not the soldier who does not know fear but it is the soldier who will not yield to the fears he feels, who is the truly courageous man. Without a fine perception and a quick apprehension of dangers on every side, no soldier could be fully alive to the necessities of his position and to the demands of his duty; and it is, in a sense, peculiarly true, that the best soldier is likely to be the most fearful. It is the Braddocks who are “not afraid” that needlessly suffer disaster; while the Washingtons who have timely fears are prepared to act efficiently in the time of disaster. There is a suggestion of this truth in the words of the Apostle, “Let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall;” or, as it might be said, Let him who has no fears have a care lest he fail from his lack of fears.

A child’s fears are on various planes, and because of this they must be differently dealt with. A child has fears which are reasonable, fears which are unreasoning, and fears which are wholly imaginary; fears which are the result of a process of reasoning, fears which are apart from any reasoning process, and fears which are in the realm of fancy and imagination. In one child one phase of these fears is the more prominent, and in another child another phase. But in every child there is a measure of fear on all three of these planes.

A child who has once fallen in trying to stand or walk, or from coming too near the top of a flight of stairs, is liable to be afraid that he will fall again if he makes another effort in the same direction. “A burnt child dreads the fire.” That is a reasonable fear. Again, a child comes very early to an instinctive shrinking from trusting himself to a stranger; he recoils from an ill-appearing person or thing; he trembles at a loud noise; he is fearful because of the slamming of shutters, even when he knows that the wind does it; he is afraid of thunder as well as of lightning, apart from any question of harm to him from the electric bolt. This is without any process of reasoning on his part, even while there is a basis of reality in the causes of his fear. Yet again, a child is afraid of being alone in the darkness; or he is afraid of “ghosts” and “goblins,” about which he has been told by others. It is his imagination that is at work in this case.

That all these different fears should call for precisely the same treatment is, of course, an absurdity. How to deal with each class of fears by itself, is an important element in the question before the parent who would treat wisely the fears of his children.

A child would be obviously lacking in sense, if he were never afraid of the consequences of any action to which he was inclined. If he had no fear of falling, no fear of fire or water, no fear of edged tools or machinery, no fear of a moving vehicle, it would be an indication of his defectiveness in reasoning faculties. Yet that there is a wide difference among children in the measure of their timidity in the presence of personal danger, no one will deny.

One child inclines to be unduly cautious, while another inclines to be unduly venturesome. Moreover, that the timidest child can be brought to overcome, in large measure, his fears of physical harm, is apparent in view of the success of primitive peoples in training their children to swim before they can walk, or to climb as soon as they can stand; and of circus managers in bringing the children of civilized parents to feats of daring agility. How to train a child to the mastery of his fears in this line, without the brutal disregard of his feelings that too often accompanies such training by savages or professional athletes, is a point worthy of the attention of every wise parent.

Because these fears are within the realm of the reasoning faculties, they ought to be removed by means of a process of reasoning. A child ought not to be beaten or threatened or ridiculed into the overcoming of his fears, but rather encouraged and directed to their overcoming, through showing him that they ought to, and that they can, be overcome. His fears are not unworthy of him; therefore he ought neither to be punished nor to be made sport of because he has them. The meeting and surmounting of his fears, within bounds, is also worthy of a child; therefore he ought to be helped to see this fact, and kindly cheered and sympathized with in his efforts accordingly.

Many a child has been trained to intelligent fearlessness, so far as he ought to be fearless, through the wise and tender endeavors of his parents to show him his power in this direction, and to stimulate him to the exercise of this power. And many a child has been turned aside from the overcoming of his fears, through the untimely ridicule of him for his possession of those fears. Because he must be a laughing-stock while struggling to master his fears, he decides to evade the struggle in order to evade the ridicule. Tenderness in pointing out to a child the wiser way of meeting his fears, is better than severity on the one hand, or ridicule on the other.

Unreasoning or instinctive fears are common to both the brightest and the dullest children. They are among the guards which are granted to humanity, in its very nature, for its own protection. It would never do for a child to make no distinction between persons whom he could trust implicitly, and persons whom he must suspect, or shrink from. It is right that he should be won or repelled by differences in form and expression. He needs to be capable of starting at a sudden sound, and of standing in awe of the great forces of nature. The proper meeting of these instinctive fears by a child must be through his understanding of their reasonable limits, and through the intelligent conforming of his action to that understanding. It is for the parent to train his child to know how far he must overcome these fears, and how far they must still have play in his mind. And this is a process requiring tenderness, patience, and wisdom.

When a child shows fear at the moaning of the wind about the house, and at its rattling of the shutters on a winter’s night, it is not fair to say to him, “Oh, nonsense! What are you afraid of? That’s nothing but the wind.” There is no help to the child in that saying; but there is harm to him in its suggestion of the parent’s lack of sympathy with him. If, however, the parent says, at such a time, “Does that sound trouble you? Let me tell you how it comes;” and then goes on to show how the wind is doing God’s work in driving away causes of sickness, and how it sometimes makes sweet music on wires that are stretched out for it to play upon,—the child may come to have a new thought about the wind, and to listen for its changing sounds on the shutters or through the trees.

One good mother sought to overcome her little boy’s fear of thunder by simply telling him that it was God’s voice speaking out of the heavens; but that was one step too many for his thoughts to take as yet. The thunder just as it was, was what gave him trouble, no matter where it came from; so when the next peal sounded through the air, the little fellow whimpered out despairingly, “Mamma, baby doesn’t like God’s voice.” And that mother was too wise and tender to rebuke her child for his unreadiness for that mode of revelation from above.

On the other hand, an equally wise and tender father, whose little daughter was afraid of the thunder, took his child into his arms, when a thunder-storm was raging, and carried her out on to the piazza, in order, as he said, to show her something very beautiful. Then he told her that the clouds were making loud music, and that the light always flashed from the clouds before the music sounded, and he wanted her to watch for both light and music. His evident enthusiasm on the subject, and his manifest tenderness toward his child, swept the little one away from her fears, out toward the wonders of nature above her; and soon she was ready to believe that the thunder was as the very voice of God, which she could listen to with reverent gratitude. If there were more of such loving wisdom exercised in parental dealing with children’s fears, there would be less trouble from the unmastered fears of children on every side.

The hardest fears to control are, however, the fears which are purely of the imagination; and no other fears call for such considerate tenderness of treatment as these, in the realm of child-training. It is the more sensitive children, children of the finest grain, and of the more active and potent imaginings, who are most liable to the sway of these fears, and who are sure to suffer most from them. Persons who are lacking in the imaginative faculty, or who are cold-blooded and matter-of-fact in their temperament and nature, are hardly able to comprehend the power of these fears over those who feel them at their fullest. Hence it is that these fears in a child’s mind are less likely than any others to receive due consideration from parents generally, even while they need it most.

Because these fears are not of the reason, they are not to be removed by reason. Because they are of the imagination, the imagination must be called into service for their mastery. It is not enough to pronounce these fears unreasonable and foolish. They are, in their realm, a reality, and they must be met accordingly. While children suffer from them most keenly, they are not always outgrown in manhood. A clergyman already past the middle of life was heard to say that, to this day, he could never come up the cellar stairs all by himself, late at night, after covering up the furnace fire for the night, without the irrational fear that some one would clutch him by his feet from out of the darkness below. The fear was a reality, even though the cause was in the imagination. And a soldier who had been under fire in a score of battles, said that he would to-day rather go into another battle than to be all alone in a deserted house in broad daylight.

In neither of these cases was the person under the influence of superstitious fears, but only of those fears which an active imagination will suggest in connection with possibilities of danger beyond all that can yet be seen. And these are but illustrations of the sway of such fears in the minds of men who are stronger by reason of their very susceptibility to such fears. These men have added power because of their vivid imaginations; and because of their vivid imaginations they are liable to fears of this sort. What folly, then, to blame a child of high imagination for feeling the sway of similar fears!

The heroic treatment of these fears of the imagination is not what is called for in every instance; nor is it always sufficient to meet the case. A child may be trained to go by himself into the darkness, or to sleep in a room shut away from other occupants of the house, without overcoming his fears of imagination. And if these fears be constantly spoken of as those which are utterly unworthy of him, the child may indeed refrain from giving expression to them, and suffer all by himself with an uncalled-for sense of humiliation, even while he is just as timid as before. It would be better, in many a case, to refrain from an undue strain on a sensitive child, through sending him out of the house in the evening to walk a lonely path, or through forcing him to sleep beyond the easy call of other members of the household; but in every instance it is right and wise for a parent to give his child the evidence of sympathy with him in his fears, and of tender considerateness of him in his struggles for their overcoming.

The help of helps to a child in meeting his fears of the imagination, is found in the bringing to his mind, through the imagination, a sense of the constant presence of a Divine Protector to cheer him when his fears are at their highest. A little child who wakened in the middle of the night, called to her parents, in another room, and when her father was by her bedside, she told him that she was afraid to be alone. Instead of rebuking her for this, he said, “There’s a little verse in the Bible, my darling, that’s meant for you at a time like this; and I want you to have that in your mind whenever you waken in this way. It is a verse out of one of David’s psalms; and it is what he said to the Lord his Shepherd: ‘What time I am afraid, I will trust in thee.’ That is the verse. Now, whenever you are afraid, you can think of that verse, and say it over as a loving prayer, and the Good Shepherd will hear you, and will keep you from all harm.”

The child repeated the verse after her father, and she saw its peculiar fitness to her case. As her father then prayed to the God of David in loving confidence, she realized more fully than before how near God was to her in the time of her greatest fears. And from that time on, that little child was comforted through faith when her imagination pressed her with its terrors. She never forgot that verse; and it still is a help to her in her fears by day and by night.

A child’s imagination ought, indeed, to be guarded sacredly. It should be shielded as far as possible from unnecessary fears, through foolish stories of ghosts and witches, told by nurses or companions, or read from improper books. But whether a child’s fears in this realm be few or many, they should be dealt with tenderly by a loving parent; not ignored, nor rudely overborne. Many a child has been harmed for life through a thoughtless disregard by his parents of the fears of his imagination. But every child might be helped for life by a sympathetic and tender treatment of these fears, on the part of his parents, while he is still under their training.

In no realm of a child’s nature has a child greater need of sympathy and tenderness from his parents, than in the realm of his fears. It is because he is sensitive, and in proportion as he is sensitive, that a child’s fears have any hold upon him. And a child’s sensitiveness is too sacred to be treated rudely or with lightness by those to whom he is dearest, and who would fain train him wisely and well.