Children and FearBy Ellen Haas (Ellen originally wrote this article about Children and Fear for a newsletter for Wilderness Awareness School) Halloween winds wring the fiery leaves off trees and they pool into rusty embers on the street: the rain has returned here in my suburb by the white-capped lake in the Pacific Northwest. In this scary holiday season, I have been pondering fear - when it’s useful, and when it’s not. In particular, I've wondered about the relationships between teaching children and fear. I found an intriguing exercise while surfing the Association of Experiential Education website. You draw three big circles in the dirt so there’s a center and two rings. The center is Comfort Zone, the first ring is Reach, and the outer ring is Panic. Then you ask questions and people stand in their rings and look at each other and tell stories about it. Which ring do you stand in on these questions? How comfortable, reaching, or panicked are YOU when • Eating macaroni and cheese?• Public speaking?• Talking with parents?• Putting a hook through a worm?• Being in charge of kids outdoors?• Talking to strangers?• Hiking in a storm?• Visiting your sit spot at night?• Using Facebook? When you’re panicked, what’s up with that? Does your spirit cringe and your mind freeze, and your heart sink? When is this appropriate, and when not? Evolutionary biology tells us humans inherited some survival traits from our animal ancestry that make us not only fight and flea, but also freeze. Freeze stock still, eyes green in the headlight, immobilized, shut down. The Stone Age Present describes this as a “depression” of energies whose purpose was to make you hide when you couldn’t fight or flee. To give you a moment to catch your breath, lick your wounds, do the basics and nothing more. In the Peacemaker legend, this is the time your relatives bring you fire and soup and let you alone to sleep and dream it off. When you’re in the Reach ring, how do you feel? Is your stress heightened, adrenaline pouring, and mind and body fully activated? Fighting and fleeing are forms of Reach. They are adventurous, focused, alert, muscular responses to challenge. They are healthy, creative stress. Somewhere I’ve heard that a life balance of about 60% stress and 40% relaxation is ideal for growth without burnout. Now let’s look at Comfort Zone. This is the circle where routine and habit prevail, a cozy contented baseline sort of place. Coyote circles just outside this zone, enticing, teasing, challenging in an ever present effort to stretch its boundaries – just a wee stretch for each episode, using a “second level” question that inflates curiosity, a “second level” story that inspires new awareness, a playful game that invisibly pulls them across the edge. Coyote Mentoring stretches the Comfort Zone by playfully shifting brain patterns to reach out into new Routines of Nature Awareness. Our underlying assumption in Coyote Mentoring is that some fear is a good thing. In fact, it seems essential to have the relationship of children and fear in our minds while planning our adventures. It keeps you agile and widens your comfort zone, giving you an ever-widening range of capable functioning. In managing outdoor education, designing an element of fear into the plan might be called “calculated risk.” Here’s an example written in one of my sidebars in Coyote’s Guide: “For a decade, I led whole eighth grades into late October storms on the far coast of the Northwest. We did it in the name of Lord of the Flies, to understand viscerally what strains fall on a group when there are no grownups to guide. We prepared hard and long, but once we got out there, in the wind and tides, the kids were on their own. They had agreements they’d signed – no litter, stay together, get to destination – but they had to carry, travel, camp, cook, and cope without us. We teachers trailed them. What happened? They survived, and they each brought home a story to tell. They met weather eye to eye. They shivered with a sense of wildness. They forged a sense of community. And in every trip, their teen culture turned topsy-turvey. Roles were reinvented. The Cool lost their cool and the Unnoticed were noticed for their wonderful gifts of courage, leadership and ingenuity. A whole new set of Heroes and Embarrassed, a re-cast of “Jacks” and “Piggys” and “Ralphs,” and “Littluns” and “Beasties” entered their cultural fabric and our English class vernacular.” When I tell my non-naturey friends in the suburbs here about my passion for waking up our contemporary culture to Leave No Child Inside, I find myself capturing their attention when I blurt “We’re abusing our children with too much safety.” I think kids should run and fall down, talk to strangers, get lost, be scared, suffer consequences and so grow stronger and more vital. If they get injured and traumatized; they’ll heal -- and bear scars that tell good stories. If we don't really examine what's going on with children and fear, we are missing a vital component of learning and growth in young people. Macbeth’s witch, Hecate, prophesies at the beginning of the play, “Security is mortals’ chiefest enemy.” This declaration led to many animated discussions in my English classrooms. It means “Our need to be in control is ultimately our downfall.” America’s drive over the past thirty years of my sixty year life toward safeguarding its citizens from all perceived harm outdoors has led to 93% of this young generation’s life being led indoors, and this is killing them. The safe indoor life leads to obesity, attention deficit disorder, digital addiction, and worst of all to disconnection from Mother Earth with all her nurturing and all her lessons and all her strengthening impact on health and intelligence. Too much fear, true terror, is NOT good for us – we panic and shut down. But just enough fear to reach beyond the current comfort zone is EXACTLY good for us. It creates the optimal learning environment. So, in the spirit of this Halloween season, I just want to encourage you to carry on with calculating risk into your mentoring programs, and keeping a good balance with children and fear. We need to take a courageous and well-reasoned lead on this. Let’s take back the night, the cold, the wet, the strange, the scary, the risky, the challenging. Let’s insist against all those responsible parents who would quash our resolve, even in the wind and cold of winter, let’s go outside and play!
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