The fears of children at the Coronavirus’s time

Abstract

This is a feasibility study that proposes a work grid for kindergarten teachers - but also for parents, grandparents and babysitters, for helping them to decipher the emotions of children and to start, with their small interlocutors, emotional awareness processes at a time, like the present one, in which we all have to face the great fear of a pandemic. The methodology is qualitative and inspired by the principles of narrative pedagogy. In light of these principles, we have prepared a conversation on the theme of the fear of Covid 19 with the aim, on one hand, of helping our little witness to become aware of the fears that agitate her imagination, on the other hand, to adopt some strategies for coping with the problem. The emotion of fear pushes the girl to attribute a certain meaning to an event (LeDoux, 1996) and it is in the exploration of this meaning that the conversation took place. Subsequently, we tried to put in place stratagems for the “management” of fear.