Understanding fear in therapeutic residential care

In therapeutic residential care (TRC), both children and staff sometimes experience fear. Scholarship in our field can benefit from a more thorough integration of contemporary research literatures on fear as a biopsychosocial phenomenon. Attending to what is known about how fear works at the individual, organizational, and cultural levels is necessary to improve working conditions and quality of care in TRC. This article draws from neuroscience, psychology, and sociology to improve our biopsychosocial understanding of the experience and consequences of fear in TRC. These literatures demonstrate that: 1) Fear is a potentially adaptive response to threat involving conscious and nonconscious neural processes; 2) Fear (and all emotion categories) is shaped by culture and therefore varies; 3) Instances of fear are constructed based on our predictions about the future rather than being reactions to experience; 4) Individuals vary in their ability to experience fear and recognize it in others, and this variation is related to other capacities of great interest in child welfare; and 5) Children and staff learn to perform and experience emotions—including fear—through explicit and implicit education in the feeling rules of their organization and broader culture. We suggest actions organizations can take now to help children and staff better understand fear and develop more adaptive responses to it. We propose directions for future research on fear in TRC that can guide efforts to make child welfare involvement a less threatening experience for children, their families, and the people who care for them.