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When Fear Of Flying Starts During Pregnancy
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Fear of flying often begins during pregnancy. We might think it is because of the responsibility for another life. But it is more than that. Shortly before deliver, the brain of the expectant mother is flooded with hormones that cause her to become obsessed with safety. Everything that even remotely looks like a risk has to be controlled or avoided. The hormones go away after delivery, but the patterns of behavior established by the hormones may continue.
The patterns need to be recognized and reviewed. Yes, you are responsible for a life other than your own. You might have previously though, "Well, if something happens, it's just me." But now you are making choices for someone else, someone totally dependent upon you. You want to make the best decisions.
To make good choices, emotion must be properly regulated. Why? Because “executive function” in the mind shuts down when there is too much emotion. To make a good decision, you need to know that you - and your child - are safer on an airliner than sleeping at home at night. What about during the day? Research has shown that driving 5.4 miles in an urban setting has the same risk as a flight. Since your daily routine probably involves a lot more than 5.4 miles of driving, you increase safety when you stop your daily routine and get on an airliner.
Being a parent is pretty overwhelming. It almost paralyzed me as a parent to think how every move I made was going to influence on my child. I had no way to know what the result of what I did would be twenty years down the road. At some point I realized this: the best gift I could give my child was the ability to make his/her own well thought-out choices. And, the way to give that gift is to model that behavior by making choices that are well thought out.
