Stranger anxiety
Experiencing fear causes toddlers to sense they are in a potentially threatened position and therefore, they go towards their caregiver in order to seek protection from the stranger.
This reaction enables children to develop instincts to guide them when they feel endangered and seek the protection of a familiar and trusted individual to ensure their safety and survival.
The stimuli which provoke a child's anxiety in the presence of a stranger are influenced by the individual's age, gender and his or her distance from the toddler.
In addition, children are more fearful of a stranger when they are standing in close proximity to them, while their caregiver is farther away or completely out of their sight.
[6] It is less probable for toddlers to experience anxiety in the presence of a stranger if a figure they trust, such as their caregivers, perform positive interactions with this person.
This enables the child to feel a certain reassurance seeing that their caregiver does not show any sign of fear in the presence of this individual.
The beginning of stranger fear is accepted to be adaptive, offering balance to infants' tendencies toward approach and exploration and adding to the developing attachment system.
[11] In their early months and years, infants acquire most of their behavioral information for their direct family and often, their primary caregivers.
[11] Stranger fear is less likely in older children (i.e. at least six years old) since there is a greater readiness for them to accept behavioral information from outside the family.
[12] However, studies show that older children do exhibit increased anxiety to new threats and avoidant responses following discussion with parents.
[13] This has important implications for parents and those working with school-age children because it suggests that they can potentially prevent or reverse fear developing if they recognize a child is involved in a fear-related vicarious learning event.
Since it is often characterized by negative emotions and fear, multiple steps were created to induct a feeling of trust and safety between the child and the strangers.
Also, research shows that exposure to circumstances that produce persistent fear and chronic anxiety can have a lifelong effect on a child's brain by disrupting its developing architecture.
Often, pediatricians will be able to find the origin of the child's anxiety and create a plan of action in order to rectify the situation.
[14] There is a significant overlap between the behaviors that characterize ASD and those observed in stranger anxiety, which makes diagnoses and research more difficult.
[14] However, individuals with ASD often have a rigid understanding of the world and behave in a very rule-based and compartmentalized manner, depending on their placement on the spectrum.
Therefore, it is crucial to appropriately teach children with autism who they may expect to meet in a given location and situation and what those people look like, in order for them to be self-sufficient and not anxious wherever they are.
The DSM- V describes stranger terror as infants with a reactive attachment disorder, inhibited type and do not respond to or initiate contact with others, but rather show extreme trepidation and ambivalence about unknown adults.
[18] Anxiety and fear around strangers usually appears around six months of age and it slowly increases throughout the first year of life.
This increase in stranger anxiety correlates with the same time as when the child starts crawling, walking and exploring its surroundings.
[citation needed] To conclude, although resistance to a stranger is common for children, the extreme reactions was far more urgent and depicted terror.
