10/06/2026
Fear of Change: How Do I Help My Child Handle Change?
Change can be uncomfortable for children and adults alike. Learning to face uncertainty instead of always avoiding it can build confidence, resilience and self-discipline.
Fear of Change: How Do I Help My Child Handle Change?
BERKELEY HEIGHTS, NJ: One of the challenges I see most prominently in people, both as a teacher and as a human being, is the fear of change.
Some are fearful that they can change. Some are fearful that they can't change. Others are fearful that they will change.
Whichever camp you might fall into, and you might fall into all of them at different points in your life, the common denominator is fear.
More specifically, it's the fear of the unknown.
However, without change, we'd still be crawling around in diapers, so obviously our fear of change can only be so strong.
Why Are We So Afraid of Change?
I read an incredible book by Jiddu Krishnamurti called *On Fear* some years back, and I still refer to it quite often because it's a really short and well-written book.
One of the ideas I took away from it was to examine how much of what we do is governed by fear and how much is governed by love.
Go ahead and take a moment to think about that because it's a terrific exercise.
When I did, one of the things I discovered was that there was a whole lot of fear governing my own decision-making.
Krishnamurti helped me realize I wasn't alone.
Fear Doesn't Always Mean We Should Stop
So I say that people should harness that fear and turn it on its head.
If I'm fearful of something that could change my life for the better, I do my best to experience that change, within reason.
Obviously, there are some things in life that don't need to be experienced in order to realize they're bad for you.
But there are many things in life that we're afraid of doing precisely because we believe we'll be judged by others.
Or worse, be judged by ourselves.
Sometimes fear is warning us about danger.
Other times, fear is simply telling us that we're about to do something unfamiliar.
Learning to recognize the difference is important.
Sometimes We Are Afraid of the Person We Might Become
One day, a fellow student I trained with who was overweight confessed that he was afraid of losing too much weight.
In his mind, it was easier to think that people might dislike him because of his weight than to consider that they might dislike him because of his personality.
Just hearing that was mind-blowing in and of itself.
He wasn't simply afraid that he couldn't change.
He was afraid of what might happen if he did.
It made me think about what might be holding me back from achieving some of my own positive changes.
How often do we hold onto something familiar, even something we don't particularly like, simply because we understand it?
And how often do we avoid becoming something better because we're uncertain about who we'll be when we get there?
Helping Children Become More Comfortable With Change
Children face versions of these same questions all the time.
A new school. A new class. A different teacher. A new activity. A more difficult challenge. A friendship that changes. Trying something they're not immediately good at.
Our instinct as adults can be to remove that discomfort.
But perhaps our job isn't always to make change comfortable.
Sometimes our job is to help children discover that they can be uncomfortable and still move forward.
Give them appropriate challenges. Let them experience uncertainty. Help them think through what they're afraid of. Give them enough support to move forward without taking the experience away from them.
Because every time a child moves through uncertainty and discovers that they're okay on the other side, the unknown becomes a little less frightening.
Self-Discipline Gives Us Some Control Over Change
At the end of the day, we're all going to change.
But choosing what to change and how to go about that change is one of the best ways to manage our fear of it.
We can't control every change that happens to us.
We can control how we respond.
So let go of your own fears and grab onto the steering wheel of self-discipline, because when you're driving your own changes, you might find that it's too exhilarating to waste time being fearful.
