What happens if the wild in the child is too repressed?

Anxiety is mental health concern number one, it leads to a variety of other mental health concerns and you might wonder why anxiety has taken such a turn for the worse.

Ordinary anxiety is important, it signals danger or it encourages effort to succeed, however when anxiety takes over it becomes crippling and it makes life a misery. Carefree being becomes impossible and relationships become a heavy duty.

One of the causes of increased and crippling anxiety is too much repression of the wild in a child. Children naturally are aggressive and violent, not too attack, but to entertain the power of their bodies, there is pleasure in exercising and asserting your motor functions, you need to get to know them. When this natural aggression and violence which is sublimated into independence and a need to explore, are too much managed, and become ‘danger free’ activities only, the wild in a child gets too repressed.

Children need to climb trees unsupervised, play outside unsupervised, ride a bike unsupervised, go to a friend or school unsupervised, obviously at the appropriate age but currently most children in cities and often also outside the city, do not have unsupervised activity outside that much, or not at all.

The consequences are: anxiety, depression, problems with anger and learning inhibitions, amongst others.

The wild in a child needs space and time to get to know its agency, its boundaries and its capacity for joy without being managed by a parent, carer or teacher. To feel trusted in this way is of underestimated value to a child and without this trust and without a space to freely and unsupervised explore the world, anxiety grows wild instead and becomes a weed.

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