Dendrophobia

Did you know that Dendrophobia is the fear of trees? Ok, so I didn’t know either. That is…until I decided to look up exactly what it is that I think my son has.

We were on our way to a friend’s house last week for Playgroup and Michael decided that he didn’t want to walk by the trees to get to their backyard. At first I didn’t understand what the problem was. Then, I saw the fear in his eyes as he stood watching the branches of the tree swaying in front of him. I would normally have picked him up, but I just so happened to be holding our snacks, the backpack, my keys and 22-pound AJ at the moment so I grabbed his hand and reassured him that the trees were nice. He looked at me, looked back at the trees warily and then said to me, “trees get you” over and over. I realized that I was not going to convince him that those trees were not about to get him, so I tried to put my body between him and the tree as best as I could and gently nudged him down the small pathway to our friend’s backyard. As soon as he got inside their back gate and saw the balloons celebrating one of his friend’s 2nd birthday, he quickly ran in to claim a balloon for himself and forgot all about those scary trees!

I’m not sure what triggered this new behavior – maybe a dream, something he saw on tv (although he only watches cartoons/kids’ programming) or maybe something that we read in a book. Whatever it was, we will start working on showing him how nice trees are!