Fear vs. caution for kids & Parents

Only very recently, while I was once again flipping through Children: The Challenge for support and inspiration, did I come across a small but powerful section on caution vs. fear. How had I missed this before? Perhaps I had been focused on more practical things at the time - like how to maintain my sanity with three energetic children. 

As an adult, I’ve come to understand how many bits of my childhood came to loom large in my adulthood. I see with compassion how my (incredible) parents’ well-meaning worries became translated into big scary fears for me. Sometimes these fears that are born in our younger years are the most potent, precisely because they have hazy origins or are remembered more in emotion than in easily articulated words.
 
Children often don’t want to tell us what has become a fear for them - I sure didn’t. Whether it’s from embarrassment, habit, or even the fear of the fear itself, children often shy away from discussing what’s bothering them. It’s very likely that our children are quietly crawling with large and small fears that play themselves out in large and small ways.

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