Environment2 min
Kids Love Sharks Until Fear Creeps In: Adelaide Study Finds Older Children Wary
A parent survey of 374 children finds most young kids like sharks, but fear rises with age, raising questions about where those views come from.
Most young children think sharks are cool. A new survey led by Brianna Le Busque, an environmental psychologist at Adelaide University, found that 69% of children aged two to 12 liked sharks. The catch is that older kids were more likely to say sharks scared them.
The study asked parents to put their children's answers to questions about what sharks look like, what they do and whether they liked them. Parents recorded the replies word for word, and siblings were questioned separately so they could not borrow each other's answers. Overall, 13.9% of children described sharks as scary or showed fear, and the rise among older kids was too consistent to be a coincidence, the team said.
Why does this matter? People tend to protect animals they like and are slower to defend ones they dread. Earlier research on children and sharks was small and mostly pointed to fear, but it skipped toddlers and often placed sharks next to friendlier animals like dogs and dolphins, which may have made them look worse by comparison. This survey looked at a wider age range and asked about sharks on their own.
The kids' own words paint a lively picture. Teeth came up in 44% of descriptions and size in 33%. One four-year-old simply called sharks very cool. A six-year-old insisted sharks were dinosaurs, not reptiles. Children who disliked sharks usually pointed to the danger, with one 10-year-old saying bluntly that sharks could eat him. The researchers did not count talk of bites as fear, since knowing an animal can hurt you is not the same as being afraid of it.
Where did the fascination start? Books were the most common source, with about 65% of children having read shark stories or heard them read aloud. Some 59% had seen sharks at an aquarium, 38% had watched them on TV and about a quarter had seen shark films. Around 13% had sung "Baby Shark." Seeing live sharks mingle with other fish may help children view them as more than monsters.
The study also found no clear differences by gender, by country (most participants lived in Australia, the U.S. or the U.K.) or by how often children swam in the ocean. It was a snapshot rather than a follow-up, so it cannot show how an individual child's feelings change over time. Still, Le Busque said the pattern raises real questions about what children learn as they grow and how media and society shape those lessons.
For parents and educators, the takeaway is practical: the curiosity is there early, so it is worth nurturing. Read-alouds, aquarium visits and accurate, balanced stories about sharks may keep that wonder alive as kids get older. The full study is covered in more detail at Earth.com.
