ABSTRACT
My two-year-old is terrified of trains. More specifically, he is terrified of their sound. The sight of trains doesn’t bother him, and he loves to play with toy trains. When he hears a train blow its horn, however, he will stop whatever he is doing and run for a parent’s arms. My wife and I have tried a variety of techniques to help him with his fear. We have explained that a train’s horn can’t hurt him. We have explained that a train always stays on its tracks and that the tracks are several blocks away. We have told him that we will always keep him safe from the train’s horn. None of this has much effect. Other techniques have been more successful. The advice he gets from watching Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood is to “Close your eyes, and think of something happy.” That helps sometimes. Apparently, imagining chocolate chip cookies can be an antidote to the fear of a train’s horn. My wife sometimes helps him out by encouraging compassion. She will take a favorite stuffed animal or doll and have Finn take care of it and its imagined train fears. By encouraging him to focus on another’s imagined pain, he can shift his focus away from his own fear. This also works sometimes, but the most successful strategy we have used involves gratitude. When he hears the train we have him imagine the good things that the train might be carrying. I might say, “Thank you, train, for bringing paper for us to draw on,” or “Thank you, train, for bringing ice cream to the store for us to buy.” This enables him to focus his attention on the unpleasant sound in a different way, seeing it as a source of benefit rather than something to fear. I believe Finn’s gratitude toward the train is virtuous, and I also believe that most philosophical accounts of gratitude fail to make room for cases like his.
