Did your parents use to scare you as a child with boogiemen, police officers, doctors and similar real or fictional characters? Are you yourself the aforementioned “summoner of the other people” to your child’s upbringing? If you can relate to the first sentence, you can easily remember the feeling that used to overwhelm you in those situations – a strong sense of fear, we assume. If you play the main role in the second one, you may wonder why you chose that method of managing your child’s behavior.

Parents resort to intimidation when they can’t deal with their troubling child in any other way, by using threats that appear dangerous and scary in child’s head. This principle of bringing fear into the child’s world is not good for several reasons. Obviously, it is unnecessary to expose child to stress and lies that are not like that in reality. Also, we will all agree that, being their biggest support, we are not here to strengthen and feed all sorts of fears but to teach child how to fight against them and deal with the most rooted ones. Instead of making your child develop a sense of trust around people of noble professions such doctors and police officers, you replace the relationship of trust with shying away from situations in which the child could face the fear you have created. If we try to frighten our child with doctors and Boogieman, we must not wonder later why the child is scared of staying alone in the room, sleeping when it is dark or going to the doctor’s for a regular check-up.

It is also very important to protect child from our own fears, that is, to avoid transferring them to our child. Ask yourself if your child is not allowed to behave in certain manner because it conflicts with the way you want to raise them, or it is a decision shaped by your fears that are not necessarily true, real or dangerous to your child. It’s completely okay that you, as an adult, have your own fears that are difficult to control in front of a child, so feel free to talk about them with your child and let them develop their own. Do not forbid your child from climbing the trees because you fell into nettles when you were little or because you are afraid of bugs. Transmitting parent’s fears to a child is a complex topic that requires separate analysis, but ask yourself how many times, just because of your own bad experience, you have not allowed the child to have their own. It is difficult to draw a line between the real danger to the child and our projection of what is good for them or not.

Parents adopt the intimidation method when they feel powerless in front of their child. Weakening of our own authority, makes us turn to the “higher”one that child would obey. So, it’s up to us parents: if you feel that your child is not listening to you, strengthen your authority by setting clear boundaries and not giving in to them, rather than calling the police and asking them to make an arrest. Authority is neither strictness nor awe, nor insistence on unquestioning obedience. If a parent manipulates a child’s fear, the child will obey not because he or she understands the request but because they are afraid.

Police officers are here to protect us and Boogieman doesn’t exist. That’s why we invited the traffic police officers in our kindergartens to hang out with us and talk, and they were more than willing to answer all our questions and dispel all fears regarding their profession. This week they helped our children to better understand their role in the child’s life, whereas we as parents should be playing our own – of an authority with whom the child feels protected and safe within the boundaries we have set.