Fear and Aeroplanes

Hello Everyone,

“Don’t worry, planes are quite safe.”

I didn’t come up with this line, but I love it: Rational thinking won’t stop irrational fears.

Telling someone who has a fear of flying that “actually, planes are quite safe”, is a terrible way to make them feel better. Unless the person you are talking to is an aerospace engineer, most people lack the technical knowledge to evaluate that kind of information. No matter how well intentioned, it’s a dumb approach because the fear isn’t really about flying, it’s about othering things, and usually, it’s about dying. 

Fear of flying only considered irrational because dying in a plane crash is rare. But it’s not zero, and if it happens to you, that’s pretty bad. Having a fear of dying is pretty rational. Dying is bad.

I fear a lot of things when it comes the Munchkin. I want to say it’s because she’s young and vulnerable, but I don’t foresee my fears dissipating all that much as she gets older. The focus might change, but not the underlying cause.

I sometimes get well-meaning people telling me not to worry, kids get up to all kinds of crazy stuff and end up okay. At this point in the conversation, they usually chuckle and tell me about all the crazy stuff they got up to as a kid and how they turned out fine. They usually leave out the part about how they grew up and started giving terrible parenting advice. 

Another chestnut I get when revealing my fears is that that kids, especially kids these days, need to get outside and experience stuff, and getting hurt is just a part of learning. It’s about as helpful as explaining the Bernoulli Principle to someone who fears flying. Which is to say: not at all helpful. 

It doesn’t matter if the risk of drowning or a car accident is small. It’s not zero and if it happens to your kid, it’s really, really, incomprehensibly bad. Just as a fear of flying is rational because flying is dangerous, fear of harm coming to your kid is rational. 

But I continue to fly. And I let my kid swim. So, how do I get over my fear? 

I don’t. 

It sits with me, and I manage it daily. Usually I win, but not always. Often, I can judo-flip it by using my fear of smothering my kid as a counter to my fear of harm coming to her. Like setting a forest fire to prevent a larger forest fire. Work smarter, not harder, as they say. 

Wes