Growing up as a child of young Iranian immigrants, author and podcast host Farnoosh Torabi was raised to be distrustful. She remembers being told, 'Don't talk to strangers!' which led to her revolting against a substitute teacher who stepped into her classroom. Big, generalized fears, she realized over time, were more crippling than healthy.
First, Torabi says, we need to stop equating fearfulness with anxiety. 'I think what fearful really means is you're being hypersensitive, you're calculating for risk, and you're taking a beat,' Torabi says. 'It doesn't always mean you're acting irrationally or freezing up. I think listening to fears can be as simple as taking a minute and reading the room.'
The idea isn't to make kids fearful but to let them express when they know something isn't right. 'What you actually want is for kids to recognize that when an adult does something unusual or something that makes them feel uncomfortable, they are allowed to sound an alarm,' Torabi explains.
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