A few days ago I heard the testimony of a mother who explained, worried, that her son had begun to express fears about things that didn't disturb him before. She was so worried that she came to request a visit with a child psychologist to assess the change in her child's behavior.
The child then had something more than two years old and, before putting my nurse to act to look for a possible physiological cause and before putting my pseudopsychologist to act to find causes that cause this effect I decided to activate my father's mind with common sense, thinking about how my children had lived fears.
Surely more than one mother or father will say the same as me: it is possible that there is something that a psychologist should value, but it is completely normal for a child to have no fear when he is young and to have a few when he grows up.
You cannot fear what is not known
It is normal because younger children are in many ways ignorant. They don't know too many bad things, they haven't seen too many tragedies (most), they don't know the language or the words too much and they barely know their emotions and therefore there aren't too many things that can scare them.
The darkness is nothing but the lack of light that is solved when mom or dad presses a large button. I do not know about you, but I have seen my children walk in the dark as they enter the wonderland, happier than an eight, without seeing beyond a span because of the lack of light.
Time has passed, as they have grown, they have learned what monsters are (through movies and stories), they have known what loneliness is (because they have lived it or felt it) and, in short, they have become more rational beings, better able to anticipate events (if I get into that place something might happen) and better able to imagine.
My philosophy professor at BUP once explained something to me that I will not forget: "we cannot imagine what we have not seen." I replied that it was not true, because I was able to draw a monster in a horrible way that I had never seen before, and he said no, that this monster would be formed by structures that I already knew or had seen on another occasion. It would be something new, nobody would know it, but it would be the sum of many inputs that I had received throughout my life.
A young child, who barely knows, cannot fear what he does not know, simply because he cannot think of something you have not seen or known. That's why young children are hardly afraid of anything. Then, as they grow, they know, reason, think, theorize and therefore begin to have fears.
So, do we take the child to the psychologist?
Surely many will ask you if that mother finally took the child to the psychologist. I don't know, although I imagine so. I have suffered the fears of my children (well, they more than me), but I have always seen it as I have explained it: a logical consequence of maturation and knowledge. I would be afraid that my children would not be afraid of anything, because perhaps they would not be learning to think and theorize with certain things.
I don't think you have to go to the psychologist because a child is afraid of something (unless it is an atrocious, disabling fear that causes the child to not live in peace) because the fears, just as they become a child a more rational being, they disappear when they become even more rational.
The more they grow and mature the more they are able to understand that monsters only exist in the movies, that in the dark the world remains the same, only that without light, and that the house does not creak because someone has entered or because the house has decided to go for a walk, but the changes in temperature or the settlement of the house on its foundations make it occasionally crunch, to give some examples.
