Using Weather to Teach a Child About Fear

My eight year old son – we’ll call him Sam – has inherited his Dad’s fascination with weather.

From his earliest days, when he could barely hold his head aloft, he would swivel in the direction of the magical TV box whenever the weather radar would come on the screen, or if he heard the computer-generated voice that gave the NOAA forecast superimposed over the map on our local weather channel.

Living in central Ohio, severe weather in the form of terrible thunderstorms and tornado watches is common. The combination of flat, open spaces and cold fronts often churns up the atmosphere, which means the local weathermeisters frequently interrupt regularly scheduled programming to jam their Super Nexrad Doppleganger Accu-Panic 4000 in our faces as they chart the speed and direction of the forthcoming swath of probable doom.

For Sam, there’s really only two things he knows about a tornado. First, they destroy homes and kill people, as evidenced by the video played and replayed ad nauseum on said TV box. Secondly, they are talking about tornado watches or warnings where he lives. Fear and panic set in, and Sam believes a tornado is heading through our subdivision, as the sky is dark and the wind is blowing where he is.

It’s senseless to explain to a pre-teen that the odds of dying in a tornado are roughly 1-60,000, or that he stands a much better chance of death by falling down (1-246) or via an air travel accident (1-20,000). That’s the thinking brain approach, and he’s not responding intellectually. His reaction is an emotional one, generated by the feeling brain. And he’s not alone. The vast majority of adults have exactly the same reaction. Even though the odds of dying of heart disease are 1-5, we still eat butter, cheeseburgers, and chips. There’s little trepidation about hopping in the car even though statistics tell us there’s a 1-100 chance of dying in a crash.

We watch news reports of horrific storms and stare at video of the carnage, and listen to sobbing testimonials from families surveying their destroyed homes, or townsfolk eulogizing the lost.  That personalizes the event in our minds and keeps it in the forefront of our memory. It’s difficult for us to recall the hundreds of tornado events each year that don’t cause death or serious injury, but our mind can quickly flash on examples of video and still photos taken from news reports and print media that document the worst scenarios. So when “tornado” hits our conscious mind, viola! Terrible event, death and destruction, risk alarm clangs loudly, fight or flight kicks in.

Between 1976 and 2000, the mean number of yearly tornado fatalities was 54. From 1912 to 1936, the mean number was 260, almost 5 times as many. So the risk has decreased substantially. But you wouldn’t know that because modern communications keeps the 54 foremost in our minds.

So how do you teach a child to not be afraid of a tornado?

I do it by telling him that in my 48 years on this planet, I have never seen a tornado, smelled a tornado, or lived anywhere that a tornado hit. He can connect with that – and there’s trust and credibility built in that no amount of statistical information can approximate. We also talk about what to do if one does happen to head our way. We know exactly where in the house we’re going to go and what we’re going to do, so he feels empowered in his situation. It’s no longer abstract – more than 17,000 days have passed without Dad experiencing a tornado, so it must be pretty darned unusual.

Then we eat healthy foods (mostly), always wear our seat belts, and change the batteries in our smoke detectors. Because I don’t want Sam to be fearful like me. I want him to live his life by paying attention to the important things while being somewhat resistant to the fear culture that’s developed.

Who knows. He might even grow up to be a storm chaser.

The Thing I Fear Most Is Fear

In 1580, French essayist Michel de Montaigne penned this sentence in “Of Fear,” The Essays (Les Essais). Others have used variations of this theme since (FDR is his inaugural address, for one) and there’s a lightning bolt of truth in this phrase for those with panic and anxiety disorders.

Once I started having panic attacks in my late 20s, fear and trepidation concerning the next episode began to intrude on everyday life. Knowing how unpleasant panic attacks were for me, I began to fret about attacks before they happened as I postulated and predicted the next one.

Would I be on an airplane? That would be terrible, for there is no escape from the pressurized metal tube in the sky. How about stuck in traffic on a tall bridge? Feeling the sway of the span would cause my heart to race in anticipation, completely ignoring the fact that engineers build flexibility and elasticity into the structure to ensure fault tolerance and to prevent catastrophic failure.

A crowded meeting room? A party filled with my friends? A job interview?

Once I began to anticipate the (inevitable) next attack, I was all but ensuring its occurrence. I became a walking, talking self-ensuring prophecy of anxiety.

Fear is scary, and physical / emotional response to perceived risks is part of our survival instinct. But it seems like we’re a lot more afraid than we used to be. I’m not sure if it’s because we see and hear hyped-up threats constantly in our 24 hour news cycle, or if we’ve lost our sense of ratio and proportion.

Driving is one of the more dangerous modes of transportation. If you ask around, people would generally acknowledge this statement as true. But in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, when everyone was afraid to fly, more people took to driving to get to their destinations, even though the risk of driving far outweighs the risk of being in a plane that’s commandeered and flown into a skyscraper.

It’s projected that an additional 1,595 people died in traffic fatalities in the year after the World Trade Center attacks, the deaths directly attributable to the increase in people driving. Statistically, we stand a 1-6,000 chance of dying in a car crash. Since only 3000 people have died due to planes crashing in tall buildings at the hands of terrorists in the history of the world, and of those, only a couple of hundred were inside the planes themselves, it stands to reason that we tossed aside rational thought and elementary school arithmetic out of fear. And rather than making us safer, fear increased the number of deaths and injuries we faced, directly opposite the result we were seeking.

It’s important for us to be able to step back, take a deep breath, and evaluate whether the measures we take out of fear are helping or hurting our cause. It’s not an easy exercise, but it is a necessary one. Otherwise, we’re constantly reacting.

More people die of malaria in a month than have died from swine flu in recorded history, but people wore ineffective surgical masks in public and began to stock up on Tamiflu rather than sending mosquito nets to Africa.

Fear makes us do idiotic things.

Pig Flu: The Odds Are With You

As the media continue to flog the pig flu story for all it’s worth, and I watch scores of people walking around wearing powder-blue surgical masks – you know, the kind with holes large enough for most bacteria to get through, including H1N1 influenza – it reminded me of how easily we’re moved into fear and panic mode by the remote possibility that something could kill us dead.

We’re all going to die of something, and none of us gets to choose the manner or location of our demise, unless we happen to take matters into our own hands. In the absence of having any real influence over the beginning of our end, one would think that we would concentrate on the next best thing – run the numbers and then attempt to learn from them in order to do as much as possible to live as long as we can.

If you take the actuarial route, you’d find that you’ll most likely die of heart disease – a one in five chance. I don’t see anyone wearing masks that keep cheeseburgers and fries from making their way into the body, or a warning system that sounds if the cold radiating from ice cream is detected close to your lips.

The odds are roughly 1 – 300,000 that we’ll perish in an asteroid strike. Where is the call to spin up a real-life team of crackpots to destroy renegade celestial bodies like that portrayed in Armageddon?

Based on the latest available information, the odds of contracting swine flu are 1 in 29,000, and the chance you’ll die from it are 1 in 736,000. You are eighty times more likely to get hit by a drunk driver right now than you are to get pig flu.

It almost seems that it’s the control, or lack of it, that’s feeding people’s fears. If we only knew what to do, what precautions to take, then we could take them. Even if they were probably ineffective (remember duct tape to keep our anthrax and biological agents?), there’s something empowering about staying out of airplances, washing your hands like Adrian Monk, and trotting around wearing a little gauze mask like Dr. Zorro.

Once again, the best advice appears to be similar to what mothers have been telling us for years – cover your nose and mouth when you sneeze, wash your hands, and stay home to rest if you don’t feel well. The Pork Council would also like to know if it would be too much trouble for you to eat something, after they’ve worked so hard to raise those piggies. Would it kill you to have some carnitas or a ham & swiss?