Why is fear seen as a weakness that may threaten our child? Fear for one’s child stems from love and concern. Watchfulness, protectiveness, and a keen scent for danger are built in parental behaviors to help infants and children survive. A parent’s fear preserves the safety of a child.

Yet a parent’s fear can become a child’s handicap when it interferes with her confidence to explore and exercise her abilities. In the novel Other Women, Lisa Alther realizes that an important skill in parenting is non-interference:

Hannah saw Mona needed only to realize she was now riding the bike on her own, so she lowered her fingertips and fell back. As their fingertips touched for the last time, and brushed apart, Hannah felt a pang of joy and pride, mixed with anguish¡ªat the loss of the little girl who couldn’t ride a bicycle… As Mona rode back, her eyes bright with triumph, Hannah first understood that parenting was a series of such small daily deaths, and that learning to let go of your charges was as crucial as learning to take them on.

Forbidding a child to ride a bike, or roller skate, or climb high on a jungle gym, may protect her from a scrape or a tumble, but it also denies her the chance to exercise the competence and care she may in fact have. If we repeatedly drive a child to school, or walk her to a neighborhood friend’s house, we may be protecting her, but we are also teaching her to remain dependent. By telling her she is “too little” or “too young,” we may be inadvertently telling her that she is incapable, and deny her the pleasure of learning to do things herself¡ªwhich is precisely what she needs self-esteem for. We need to check our inappropriate fears.