RULE 55

Keep your fears and insecurities to yourself

Here’s a scenario you may recognize – I’ve seen it many times. You’re at a zoo of some kind, and you’re in the reptile section. A family is watching a beautiful snake with exquisite markings as it moves gracefully along a branch. The watching mother^* says, ‘Ugh! It’s horrible!’ The same often happens at the spider enclosure, and again at the scorpion tank.

Now luckily, some kids have got more sense than to take any notice of this. (And most mothers have more sense than to do it.) But there are kids who are susceptible to this, and many, many children who learn to say ‘Ugh!’ to reptiles and creepy crawlies because grown-ups are stupid enough to set an example. Actually these creatures are beautiful, and children should be encouraged to appreciate them, or at least to reach negative views by themselves rather than with active encouragement.

Children are heavily influenced by us, and you can saddle your kids with all sorts of worries if you’re not careful. Since they’re bound to come up with plenty of fears of their own, they really don’t need yours as well. So keep them to yourself.

One Rules mother I know was really afraid of spiders. Bordering on the phobic. But because she didn’t want her little girl to feel the same way, if there was a spider in the girl’s bedroom, along would come Mum with a duster to catch the offending creature and shake it out of the window. It would leave her trembling but the little girl never knew because Mum was so determined to keep it to herself. Except for the time she dropped the spider by accident, realized what had happened, but couldn’t face searching for it. So she pretended it had gone out of the window. She only got found out when the little girl pulled back the covers of her bed to get in and found the spider sitting there waiting for her. Oops.

I’m not just talking about spiders or snakes, of course. I’m talking about things like, say, fear of being abducted. Naturally you want them to develop a healthy wariness, but not an excessive fear that is disproportionate to the risks. That can be hugely and unnecessarily limiting on their social life. Or what about fear of failure? I know one father who discouraged his children from applying to university because they’d be so upset if they didn’t get in.

It can be hard to bite your tongue, and your kids will pick up on hidden signals too, but the more you try to conceal your personal worries, the better chance you have of succeeding. That frees your children up to enjoy life and make their own discoveries – and develop their very own insecurities without any help from you.