Developmental research often tells us how egocentric children are. Yet all too often we hear of children who are forced to demonstrate great courage and care in in a crisis.
The ongoing inquiry into the 2024 mass stabbing of young girls in Southport, England, has produced accounts of extreme bravery among the children subjected to the attack. Indeed, the report of a child standing in front of her sister to protect her from knife blows shows a level of courage many adults might not have possessed in the same circumstances.
Details have also emerged of young children holding the door open to allow other children to escape from their attacker first and of children helping others not draw attention to themselves by running or screaming. Similar accounts often emerge from school shootings in the U.S.—take, for example, the report of a teenager confronting a gunman who attacked pupils at a high school in Colorado in September 2025.
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How could such young people conduct themselves with so much composure and selflessness? Psychological research finds that children develop the cognitive, personal and emotional skills needed earlier than people might realize.
Although much of our understanding of human courage comes from the adult field, developmental psychology professor Peter Muris’s 2009 study examined the link between fear and courage in children aged eight to 13. His interviews and studies with his young participants found there may be a link between increased courage and the personality traits of extroversion, openness, and intellect.
He also found 94% of the children in his study had already carried out at least one courageous action in their lives, such as dealing with an animal they were afraid of or defending a friend from bullies.
And a 2021 study found that extroversion in teenagers seemed to protect them from developing anxiety. It could be that many of the young children who have acted bravely in a crisis had higher scores of this protective trait.
Experimental psychologist Joana Viera and her colleagues in their 2020 study explored how humans react when faced with a threat in the form of an electric shock and the option to help another person avoid the shock. They found that as the likelihood of the threat increased, humans were more likely to go to the aid of another, even at risk of a shock to themselves. Their study suggests that defensive states of mind also activate cognitive processes which promote caregiving.
Psychologists Tony Buchanan and Stephanie Preston explored how stress can promote altruism, in their 2014 analysis. They emphasized that the neural circuits that support caretaking under stress overlap with brain circuits associated with reward and motivation. These two areas act together during times of stress, helping shift the person’s response away from avoidance of threat toward the protection of others.
This caretaking mechanism is seen in many animals from rats to gorillas. Social psychologist Daniel Batson suggested there are two types of responses to acute threat, one motivated from personal distress, which is-self focused, and another based upon sympathetic or empathic responding linked to altruism. We all have the potential to respond in either way, which makes the courage of these children all the more impressive.
Several psychologists have found children as young as 12 months old can recognize and respond with empathy to distress in other humans. A 2011 study found that children as young as two years old could respond to others’ distress with verbal comfort, advice, and distraction. The researchers also demonstrated that infants responded with heightened distress when presented with the sounds of distress in others.
In order to remember instructions and to show higher-order skills such as empathy and the care of others over oneself, the children needed to draw on their developing executive function and areas of the brain’s limbic region. This system is a group of connected brain structures that helps regulate emotions and behavior. These areas are typically fully developed by young adulthood.
In the stories that have emerged, you can hear how the children seem to have internalized advice from adults about how to act in an emergency. Repeated instructions are actually easier to recall under acute stress.
These structures are developing throughout childhood. But research has persistently shown that children of preschool age perform executive functioning tasks such as the ability to perceive and respond to another person’s emotional state. Rather than respond from a instinctive fight-or-flight response, the children who stay calm during critical moments contain their fear enough to care for others.
A 2010 study investigated the areas of the brain in adults associated with increased bravery. Participants with a fear of snakes had to bring a live snake close to their head. The study found courage was associated with the dissociation of fear and sensory arousal. This means that those people who show courage during stressful situations may disconnect from their feelings of fear and their physiological experiences of fear in the body.
The combination of dissociation and instruction retrieval could help explain how they were able to stay so calm and come to the aid of others. Indeed, caring for others in times of distress can distract us from our own acute distress.
Self-efficacy, or the ability to act during times of threat, can also protect people against the development of post-traumatic symptoms. And a 2019 study found that positive traits such as hope, competence, and optimism may also protect people against the development of post-traumatic stress disorder.
In all instances where children are faced with such great adversity, one can only hope the bravery and mastery they show offers some protection against the immense psychological trauma they endure.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
