When is fear a warning, and when is it a false alarm?
Hello friends,
I continue to feel grateful for the conversations unfolding around the Mindfulness and Self-Compassion Workbook for Kids series—conversations rooted in the real joys and struggles children face as they grow. My writing here will keep returning to those everyday challenges, and to the playful, practical tools that help build resilience over time.
I want to share a story about a child I’ll call Amy. I’ve written about Amy before as we explored motivation and what’s happening beneath children’s resistance. Amy was struggling with what appeared on the surface to be a lack of motivation to initiate social time with friends, but we discovered that more was happening. Under the surface of resistance, she felt “terrified” to reach out to friends and take the first step in making plans. (If you’d like to learn more about Amy’s discovery process, you can visit this blog.)
Two types of fear
When I work with kids, I like to start by helping them understand fear’s purpose: fear is built into the architecture of our brain to keep us safe. We do a playful imagining activity about being a wild giraffe (a simple way to help kids understand fear’s protective role), and then we begin to differentiate between the two types of fear.
Sometimes fear is pointing us toward an actual danger, and we want to pay a lot of attention to this kind of fear. We want to honor the message of fear when our intuition says a grown-up has bad intentions or a pathway home from school does not seem safe. Other times, fear is pointing us toward something that feels threatening, but doesn’t actually put us in danger. In the case of Amy, texting a friend was this second kind of fear, which I teach kids to call a “false alarm.” Our job as caregivers is to help kids recognize the difference and respond to each kind of fear differently. We want to appreciate and honor fear, AND we also want to be wise.
In Volume 2 of the Mindfulness and Self-Compassion Workbook for Kids, children learn to identify the “false alarm” kind of worry, as illustrated in this visual:
I then use a playful analogy to make it even clearer for kids to differentiate these two types of fear: a barking dog.
The Barking Dog Analogy
Have you ever seen a dog in a house barking furiously at the front window at every person that passes by? This dog thinks that the people passing by are a threat even though the dog is actually safe inside the house.
Here’s where I have kids create a picture of their barking dog:
Amy was able to see clearly that her fear of texting friends to invite them to hang out was a “barking dog” kind of fear, not a real threat. Choosing the actual dog (she drew a chihuahua) was an important part of helping her become mindful of her fear in a playful and nonjudgmental way.
Next we began to explore how we could “soothe” the barking dog. Rather than trying to make the fear go away, we focused on helping Amy feel safer with the fear so she could build the capacity to face it. We used the resilience animals and applied the habits to the dog and ourselves.
The above image from the workbook allows kids to choose their favorite strategies:
- We can name what is happening (speak to the dog calmly).
- We can notice our five senses, including sights and sounds and the bottoms of our feet (help the dog look around).
- We can move our bodies. Exercising, stretching, or slowing down our breathing can help (take the dog for a walk).
- We can offer ourselves kindness and remember that everyone feels this way sometimes (pet the dog).
Each idea corresponds with a resilience animal habit. If you’d like a refresher of the animal habits and an example of how to apply the resilience habits in real life, you might enjoy this article: https://jamielynntatera.com/2025/12/resilience-habits-for-worried-kids/
Oftentimes parents and other caregivers of children want to jump to action: get Amy to overcome her fears and text her friends. Over time, we can move toward the action phase, which is critical. But it’s not where we start. We begin with becoming mindful and befriending the space that we are in.
Thank you for being on this journey with me,
Jamie Lynn