fear itself
At times it can feel like fear is parenting’s dominant emotion, as if a permanent knot of anxiety is the price one must pay for experiencing such profound, unquestioning love. It makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. We have comparatively few children, as far as mammals go, and our babies are almost impossibly helpless when they’re born, a practical compromise that has allowed us to develop our oversize brains. Scarcity and fragility: of course we must fear for them. It’s part of what makes us the loving, attentive parents who are able to shepherd our kids down the long path to maturity.
Even so, there are plenty of grounds on which to wonder whether this whole parental fear caper has gotten a mite out of hand. Nowadays we fear strangers, creeps and catastrophes. We fear disease, distress and potentially allergenic food. We fear our children falling behind, struggling and becoming lost and it all being our fault, because, well, of course it is. We fear the judgement of parents, teachers and experts. We even fear that we fear too much,
