How to be a great second chicken (a.k.a. parent)

She was eight years old and screaming.

We were enjoying a bushwalk in the reserve near our house. Actually, I was enjoying a bushwalk. She’d been reluctantly dragged away from an elaborate Sylvanian Families scene she was right in the middle of — complicated plot line, very important. But I’d decided fresh air and exercise would be good for her anxiety, which she’d been struggling with a lot lately.

(Ha. How ironic that turned out to be.)

As we traipsed along the path, a cloud of insects rose from the grass in front of us. A LOT of insects. Those creepy ones that look like flying ants. The kind you could imagine biting you.

She started screaming. Over and over. Her screams echoing across the reserve. People in the neighbouring houses probably thought someone was being murdered.

‘Calm down!’ I kept pleading, pulling her hand, trying to get her back to the car. ‘They won’t hurt you, I promise!’ But she was frozen. Trembling. Couldn’t move. The whole thing started stressing me out too. I could feel my frustration and anxiety levels rising.

Now I cringe, looking back on how I handled that. But I didn’t know any better. Most of us don’t. We just keep telling our kids to calm down and wondering why it never works.

What Was Actually Happening in Her Brain

It wasn’t until much later that I understood what had gone on during that bushwalk. Catherine Pittman and Elizabeth Karle, authors of Rewire Your Anxious Brain (2015), describe two separate pathways in the brain that create anxiety: the cortex (the thinking brain) and the amygdala (the alarm system). The cortex produces worry, rumination, catastrophising. But the amygdala? It reacts before you even know what you’re reacting to.

And here’s the important bit: when the amygdala takes control, it can override the cortex entirely. The thinking brain doesn’t get a vote.

Put simply: when your child is in the middle of a panic attack or meltdown, the part of their brain that could hear your reasoning, process your logic, and respond to ‘calm down’ has been temporarily switched off. It’s like asking someone to make a phone call on a phone with no signal. The hardware is there. It’s just not available right now.

Ohhh, I thought, when I first read this. So all those times I’d been pleading with her to calm down, to listen, to just think about it — I was talking to a brain that had temporarily lost the ability to do any of those things.

No wonder it didn’t work.

Their Alarm System Is Doing Its Job (Even When It Looks Like Overreacting)

Evolutionary psychiatrist Randolph Nesse, author of Good Reasons for Bad Feelings (2019), explains why our alarm systems are so jumpy. He calls it the ‘smoke detector principle.’ The cost of a false alarm — your body reacting to something that turns out to be nothing — is pretty low. A bit of wasted energy. But the cost of missing a real threat? That could be fatal.

So evolution built a system that’s massively biased towards false alarms. Better to jump at a hundred shadows than to miss the one actual danger. By design, the vast majority of anxiety responses are false alarms. They’re supposed to be false alarms. That’s the system working correctly.

When my daughter saw those insects and started screaming, her amygdala had decided she was in danger. It wasn’t a choice. It wasn’t dramatic. It was her brain doing exactly what evolution designed it to do — react first, think later. Her alarm went off. And just like a smoke detector, it didn’t care that the ‘threat’ was a bunch of harmless bugs. It fired anyway.

Why Some Kids Are Wired to React More Strongly

This is what I wish I’d known years earlier.

Jerome Kagan, a psychologist at Harvard, spent decades studying temperament in children. He found that about twenty per cent of babies are born what he called ‘high-reactive’ — when exposed to new sights, sounds, and smells, they cry more, startle more, and show more physical distress than other babies. These weren’t learned responses. These were four-month-old infants. Their amygdalas were simply wired to react more strongly to unfamiliar things.

A significant number of these high-reactive babies grew into cautious, anxious children. Not all of them. But the predisposition was there from birth.

I didn’t need a study to tell me which group my daughter fell into. But knowing this — really understanding it — changed everything. Because it meant her big reactions weren’t a behaviour problem. They weren’t defiance or drama. They were neurological wiring. She wasn’t giving me a hard time. She was having a hard time.

(Basically, her brain is like a smoke detector that goes off every time someone makes toast. Not her fault. Just how the wiring works.)

And pushing a high-reactive child through situations that overwhelm them, without helping them regulate first, doesn’t toughen them up. It often does the opposite. Pittman and Karle (2015) explain that the amygdala learns through repetition. The more an alarm pathway fires without resolution, the more easily it fires next time.

What I Should Have Done Instead (And What You Can Try)

There’s a somewhat amusing concept in Lawrence Cohen’s book The Opposite of Worry (2013) – he calls it the second chicken. It comes from an experiment where a frightened chicken, frozen in fear, watches a second chicken nearby. If that second chicken is also panicked, the first one stays frozen. If the second chicken is calmly walking around, the first one quickly recovers.

Your child is the first chicken. You are the second.

On that bushwalk, I was a panicked second chicken. Pulling her hand. Pleading. Flustered and frustrated. Every signal I was sending told her nervous system: yes, this is bad, you should stay scared. I thought I was helping. I was actually pouring fuel on the fire.

Once I understood that, the question shifted. The question wasn’t how do I make her stop. It was how do I become a calm second chicken so she has someone to borrow calm from.

And then there’s what to actually say, which is its own challenge. Dr Regine Galanti, in Parenting Anxious Kids (2023), uses a wonderful analogy for this: she calls it the mac and cheese recipe. You need two ingredients, and leaving either out ruins the dish. The first is validation — letting your child know you understand what they’re feeling. The second is confidence — letting them know you believe they can handle it.

Most of us, in the moment, accidentally serve up just one or the other. Either we go full ‘you’re fine, just push through’ (all confidence, no validation), or we go full ‘oh sweetheart, this is so awful, let’s just leave’ (all validation, no confidence). Neither works on its own. The magic is both, together: I can see this feels really scary, and I know you can get through it.

I’m not a psychologist, and every child is different. But here’s what I’ve learned since that bushwalk that’s made the biggest difference for us:

Stop talking (or at least, talk less)

When their alarm has fired, words are noise. Keep it short and calm. ‘I’m here. You’re safe. I know you can get through this.’ That’s it. The reassurance isn’t in the words — it’s in your presence and your tone.

Be a great second chicken

Slow your own breathing. Lower your voice. Drop your shoulders. If you’re stressed and frantic (like I was, pulling her hand and pleading), you’re adding fuel to their fire. If you can become genuinely calm — not performing calm, actually calm — their nervous system has something to lock onto. They borrow your regulation.

(Easier said than done when your child is screaming and the neighbours are probably calling the police. I know. But it does make a difference.)

Use the mac and cheese

Once you’ve dropped your own stress levels, the words you choose matter. Validate first: ‘I can see those bugs really scared you.’ Then add confidence: ‘I know you can handle this with me here.’ Both ingredients. Every time.

Wait it out

A cortisol surge takes time to come down — the research suggests at least twenty minutes before the hormones start clearing, and often longer for things to feel fully settled. That feels like an eternity when you’re standing in a park with a screaming child. But trying to rush it — reasoning, bargaining, threatening, physically dragging them away — usually just extends it. The fastest path through is to let the wave pass.

Save the lesson for later

Once they’re calm — properly calm, not just quieter — that’s when the thinking brain is back online and available to learn. That’s when you can gently talk about what happened, validate how scary it felt, and maybe work on strategies for next time. During the meltdown? Not the time. I learned this the hard way. Multiple times over actually.

Remember: it’s not a behaviour problem

This was the biggest shift for me. My daughter wasn’t choosing to scream. Her brain had detected a threat, flooded her system with stress hormones, and shut down her ability to think rationally. Treating it like an overreaction — with frustration, saying ‘just stop it’ — is like reprimanding a child for flinching when a ball comes hurtling towards their face. It doesn’t help. It just adds shame on top of fear.

She’s Fifteen Now

My daughter is fifteen, and bugs don’t bother her much anymore. Not because her amygdala has changed — it’s the same alarm system it always was. But the part of her brain that talks the alarm down has had seven more years to develop. The prefrontal cortex — the bit responsible for rational thought and calming things down — isn’t fully mature until your mid-twenties. At eight, her alarm was fully operational but her braking system was still in the very early stages of construction. No wonder it overwhelmed her.

(This, by the way, is also why teenagers make questionable decisions. Fully powered emotional engine. Half-built brake pedal. Fun combination.)

We still have hard moments. I still don’t always get it right. But I’ve stopped telling her to calm down, and I’ve started being the second chicken instead. Sometimes that means saying very little. Sometimes it means just sitting nearby. It doesn’t look like much. But it’s the thing that works.

If you’re in the thick of it right now — if your child’s big feelings are scaring you, exhausting you, making you wonder what you’re doing wrong — please know that you’re not failing. You’re learning. And the fact that you’re reading this means you care enough to try to understand what’s going on.

References

Cohen, L. J. (2013). The opposite of worry: The playful parenting approach to childhood anxieties and fears. Ballantine Books.

Galanti, R. (2023). Parenting anxious kids: Understanding anxiety in children by age and stage. Familius.

Kagan, J., & Snidman, N. (2004). The long shadow of temperament. Harvard University Press.

Nesse, R. M. (2019). Good reasons for bad feelings: Insights from the frontier of evolutionary psychiatry. Dutton.

Pittman, C. M., & Karle, E. M. (2015). Rewire your anxious brain: How to use the neuroscience of fear to end anxiety, panic, and worry. New Harbinger.