Foolish Fears.

The effect of our sympathy with children in winning their confidence and love, is all the more powerful when it is exercised in cases where they are naturally inclined not to expect sympathy—­that is, in relation to feelings which they would suppose that older persons would be inclined to condemn.  Perhaps the most striking example of this is in what is commonly called foolish fears.  Now a fear is foolish or otherwise, not according to the absolute facts involving the supposed danger, but according to the means which the person in question has of knowing the facts.  A lady, for example, in passing along the sidewalk of a great city comes to a place where workmen are raising an immense and ponderous iron safe, which, slowly rising, hangs suspended twenty feet above the walk.  She is afraid to pass under it.  The foreman, however, who is engaged in directing the operation, passing freely to and fro under the impending weight, as he has occasion, and without the least concern, smiles, perhaps, at the lady’s “foolish fears.”  But the fears which might, perhaps, be foolish in him, are not so in her, since he knows the nature and the strength of the machinery and securities above, and she does not.  She only knows that accidents do sometimes happen from want of due precaution in raising heavy weights, and she does not know, and has no means of knowing, whether or not the due precautions have been taken in this case.  So she manifests good sense, and not folly, in going out of her way to avoid all possibility of danger.

This is really the proper explanation of a large class of what are usually termed foolish fears.  Viewed in the light of the individual’s knowledge of the facts in the case, they are sensible fears, and not foolish ones at all.

A girl of twelve, from the city, spending the summer in the country, wishes to go down to the river to join her brothers there, but is stopped by observing a cow in a field which she has to cross.  She comes back to the house, and is there laughed at for her foolishness in being; “afraid of a cow!”

But why should she not be afraid of a cow?  She has heard stories of people being gored by bulls, and sometimes by cows, and she has no means whatever of estimating the reality or the extent of the danger in any particular case.  The farmer’s daughters, however, who laugh at her, know the cow in question perfectly well.  They have milked her, and fed her, and tied her up to her manger a hundred times; so, while it would be a very foolish thing for them to be afraid to cross a field where the cow was feeding, it is a very sensible thing for the stranger-girl from the city to be so.

Nor would it certainly change the case much for the child, if the farmer’s girls were to assure her that the cow was perfectly peaceable, and that there was no danger; for she does not know the girls any better than she does the cow, and can not judge how far their statements or opinions are to be relied upon.  It may possibly not be the cow they think it is.  They are very positive, it is true; but very positive people are often mistaken.  Besides, the cow may be peaceable with them, and yet be disposed to attack a stranger.  What a child requires in such a case is sympathy and help, not ridicule.