Fear factor

At age three, my daughter likes to pore over medical textbooks. Books on skin diseases, in particular, fascinate her.

She can look at color photos of hideous conditions like epidermal necrolysis or acne vulgaris, or annotated blowups of nodular vasculitis, which leaves golf ball-sized lesions on the arms and legs, and not bat an eyelash. These are images, I assure you, that would put George Romero and Wes Craven to shame; yet to the doctor, they’re merely illustrative.

She can look at these photos, she tells us, because she wants to be a doctor – specifically a dermatologist, like her lola – when she grows up.

We do not discourage her in this goal, though we think her choice of reading matter will probably make the other pre-school kids (and parents) lose their lunches, if not run away screaming in horror.

Isobel has met just about every challenge put to her in life (so far) without fear troubling her developing mind – though she often loses interest once the novelty is gone. At two, she rode a rollercoaster (not a real one, but the one in old Dreamscape) with her ninang – before anyone realized that she was well below the minimum height required for the ride. She took all the dips and climbs like a dispassionate pro; she hadn’t been taught to shriek at appropriate moments, like her ninang did. After that, she rode the bumper cars.

At three, kids treat a chair at a dinner table as their own personal jungle gym. Isobel – at that stage in between high chair and comfortable sitting position at the table – will balance herself on the edge of a chair, lean back, prop herself on her knees – anything but sit properly. And that old saw about parents warning their kids not to run with scissors? We do it several times a week; kids just seem to naturally enjoy running with scissors.

On the other hand, Isobel will stand up before a room full of strangers at a party, and if someone cues the music, she will perform a dance in full flamenco gear – something, I assure you, her parents have never shown any interest in doing (both the standing-before-strangers part and the flamenco dancing).

Kids start out with a clean slate, without layers of experience to block their encounters with life, to throw up warning flags at certain challenges. They don’t know what to be afraid of. Impossible is nothing.

Parents, on the other hand, have fear built into their job description. I spent most of Isobel’s first year watching her chew and swallow her food closely, always somehow afraid that she might choke on something. This was not a baseless fear – she has, on occasion, tussled with a piece of macaroni or a slice of grape; then it’s the finger hooked into the mouth, clearing away the food, coaxing her to spit it out. Parents – and titas, and ninangs – have to be ready at a moment’s notice to sling a child over their knees, and slap them between the shoulder blades. Heimliching is also part of a parent’s job description, it seems.

Whenever there’s a children’s party, there’s the possibility of something going wrong. Pool parties, especially. With a pool party, the proportion of adults to children inside the pool never seems to match up. This makes any available adult an instant lifeguard. I’ve found myself, on at least one occasion, reflexively grabbing and retrieving a kid who had suddenly spilled forward in one foot of water – experiencing that wondrous and bewildering experience: floating, or thrashing, with a face full of chlorine. Baptism is never easy, for adults or kids. You just grab a kid, any kid in danger, and pull them back. Then you shop the kid around – dripping, bewildered – to the appropriate guardian, or else turn them loose.

Food is another fear factor. Kids will do in a flash what it takes years for your adult fear calculator to contemplate. A two-year-old girl who is not supposed to eat Gummi Bears – will automatically stuff an entire Gummi Bear hamburger into her face. Thank God there’s usually a tita or ninang around to throw that kid over her knees and start pounding the back like she’s a gummed-up bottle of ketchup. The kid usually stands up right after as though nothing unusual had happened, then races off, back into the fray.

You wonder about kids’ incapacity for fear. You wonder if adults wouldn’t be better off that way – or if, at least, they had titas and ninangs to guide them through life’s difficult, scary moments. Wouldn’t Jimi Hendrix have stuck around longer, long enough to record a few more albums, if he’d had a yaya or a tita around to clear his esophagus? And maybe River Phoenix could have used a little more parental care around the Viper Room.

But adults, it is believed, develop fear as a vital survival mechanism: a way to avoid life-threatening behaviors. It’s the fight-or-flight response. Too bad fear is sometimes not enough to dissuade us adults. Sometimes it’s too much.

I wonder at what age our daughter will close the medical textbook – declare it "gross" or "yucky" and turn to Roald Dahl or C.S. Lewis or J.K. Rowling instead. Or if she will stick with the textbooks, swallow her emerging fears and carry on to med school. She might even learn to conquer those fears throughout life, at every challenge and every turn. Except I don’t think I’m prepared to help her with her pre-med homework without losing my lunch.