How are we afraid?

A toddler's question that unraveled everything I thought I knew about fear

“Dada, How Are We Afraid?”

Umm…Silence. My mind blanks, caught off guard by a question that feels both simple and impossibly deep.

“Dada, how are we afraid?” He repeats in his innocent little voice—insistent, as children are.

“Well…hmm.”

The question made my brain freeze.

“Do you mean, ‘Why are we afraid?’”

“No, Dada, how are we afraid?” He emphasizes the how, as if saying, Come on, man, this isn’t that hard.

I struggled with both the question and how to answer it appropriately.

“How are we afraid. That’s a great question, Ash. Let me think about it. Do you know?”

I turned the question back on him—a classic teaching move and a pretty useful parenting trick. (Apparently, it’s good to let kids answer first for themselves—it supposedly builds autonomy.)

“No. I ask you first, Dada.”

Damn—He got me.

My First Answer: The Body Decides

“Ok…” I start cobbling together a response to a question I didn’t fully understand.

“Well, I think it’s not something you choose. Being afraid is something your body chooses for you.”

I pause to check for understanding. He’s staring off into space, expressionless. I keep going.

“It’s usually when we worry that something bad might happen, like when you get lost and can’t find Mama or Dada or…” I struggled to think of other examples in which Ash might have worried. It made me realize that “worry” might not be a familiar emotion for him.

A life without worry. What a pleasure of childhood.

It’s a testament to how secure his world is here in America (despite its seeming unraveling) and the ways Claire and I have created stable routines and secure emotional bonds. Plus, there are numerous factors completely outside my control—being a well-off, white, male, tow-headed toddler who’s as quintessentially cute as the Gerber baby certainly contributes to his perception of the world as a friendly place.

Yet, I’m sure he was afraid of something, so I asked.

“Ash, what are you afraid of?”

“Ghosts,” he looks up at me, his lovie clutched tight, as if waiting for me to name the ghost in the room.

I wasn’t expecting that one. Then I remembered it was just Halloween; made sense.

The Ghost Solution

“You know what buddy? Most ghosts are just like us. They want friends, food, and a place they can call home. If you see a ghost, give them a snack. They probably want to hang out.”

I winced at my own advice—when dealing with encounters of the third kind, offer snacks and smiles—seemed sensible enough.

Then, I reminded Asher that as long as he is with Mama and Dada, we would keep him safe; there was nothing to be afraid of.

Nothing to be afraid of. Really? Was I lying? Was I denying him the right to have his own fears? Perhaps. But it seemed like a comforting lie, developmentally appropriate, one that could be unpacked at a later time.

I hedged, “Not perfectly safe, of course, because no one is perfect.” It’s a theme I try to drill into his psyche to heal my own perfectionism. “But safe enough—you can count on us to be here for you.”

“But Dada, you said being afraid chooses you.”

Damn. The ability of a toddler to disassemble the logical flaws in your statements is, well, flawless.

“Yes, it chooses you, but you can choose how you respond. You can feel afraid without letting it overpower you. You can feel afraid and trust that it will be ok at the same time.”

At this point, the conversation drifted. Either that last statement was too meta (the fear of fear itself) or the sounds outside captured his attention. I don’t remember, nor do I really care.

I was still enveloped in his initial question: “How do we be afraid?”

The Biology of Fear

This nighttime interaction left me wondering about fear: where does it come from? How does it show up? Why does it exist? All seemed equally important to explore.

At one level, we are afraid because our nervous system perceives danger, even if it’s ambiguous, elusive, or entirely mentally fabricated. Our bodies hold a memory that says, pain, harm, discomfort—avoid such unpleasant, threatening things at all costs.

Being the thoughtful creatures we are (linguistically oriented and cognitively inclined), we attach all sorts of stories about these things: why they’re bad, why we don’t like them, how to avoid them, and what might happen if we don’t.

The Other Interpretation

Then it hit me. What if I was completely misinterpreting Asher’s question?

What if this wasn’t about biology, or psychology, or even ghosts under the bed? What if he were asking, “Dada, we have all of this—all this wealth, security, community, technology, and abundance—how can we still be afraid? Don’t we have enough to protect us?”

What if, from his place of total trust, he’s asking why we—grown-ups with so much—still tremble at the unknown? Why, when surrounded by love and abundance, does some part of us hold tight to fear?

I started down another favorite rabbit hole of mine: over-interpreting my son’s words.

Maybe the real fear is not the ghost, but the possibility of losing what we love—or the illusion that we ever truly possess it. Maybe fear is what happens when the “I” feels separate from the flow of things.

When Control Is an Illusion

If I trusted that all of this was part of some larger process, that the energy coursing through me, animating my consciousness, was doing exactly what it meant to be doing, then maybe the fear of harm, death, or loss would go away. Fear only seems to have power when rooted in an idea of a separate self, an individual ego, an isolated body.

“How can we be afraid?” might be calling us to live more deeply, more interconnected, more accepting that a “we” is less likely to be afraid than an “I”.

What He Was Really Asking

Perhaps this is where Asher was going. Perhaps in his two-and-a-half-year-old mind, there wasn’t enough of a separate self to fear losing it. It was like he was beginning to see what this game of life was all about—how all these adults run around thinking they’re someone to avoid the realization they might not be anyone.

I sat rocking him in my arms. In that moment, we were both completely unafraid and completely not ourselves, as in separate selves. We were life unfolding—not afraid to lose it and not afraid to fully live it either.