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3 WAYS TO HELP YOUR KID PUSH PAST FEAR
By Kendra Fleming

There’s a difference between being courageous and being stupid (fear has a healthy
side too). However, most kids today lose courage because fear creeps in early.
Sometimes it’s easy to think that courageous people are people who experience no fear.
That’s just not true. Courage isn’t the absence of fear . . . it’s the willingness to walk through it.
Here are three tips to help your kids push past fear and discover more courage.

1. Tell them about a time you overcame fear.
It can be tremendously revealing to a child to discover that mom or dad, or someone
else they respect, had to push through fear, too. Tell them about a time you were scared but
made it through to the other side.

​2. Out-think fear with them.
Fear has an enemy: rational thought. Naturally, not all fear is bad. Fear of playing in traffic or
plunging your hand into a pot of hot water is a good thing. But the fear you, me, and our kids
struggle with most is the fear that tells us that it’s too hard, that we’re not smart enough, good
enough or capable enough to do something.
The problem with that kind of fear is that once we agree with it, it gains power. It overtakes
our emotions and paralyzes us and imbeds itself as truth.
The future gets sabotaged because we believed a lie.
So help your kid focus on what they know is true, not on what they feel is true. If your child is
worried and afraid of failing a test, make sure they study hard. Then help them out-think fear.
studied hard. I know more than I think I know right now. People like me pass tests like this every day.
I know I’m ready to give this my best shot.
Out-thinking fear is one of the best ways to push past it.

​3. Encourage them.
If you go back to the root meaning of encourage, it means to give courage— literally to
en-courage. Encouragement gives someone courage. Encourage your kids when they’re
doing courageous things, like talking to a friend who’s mad at them, saying sorry to his sister, trying
out for a team, or getting back up on their bike after a big fall. Often the way to find courage is
when someone’s in your corner encouraging you to do the hard things that fear would keep you
from doing.

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