What do you when your once-fearless child is all of a sudden afraid of the very movies and activities he or she used to enjoy?
Pure fright is a feeling adults experience so rarely that, this time of year, we even go out of our way to spook ourselves with horror movies or those Halloween haunted-house things where minimum-wage teenagers jump out at you and scream. It’s fun because we know it’s just pretend.
Little kids, however, do not.
Our three-year-old son, Emile, used to be fearless. But, for the past few months, he’s been afraid every night. He first began showing fear of things like big slides or fast Merry-Go-Rounds in the spring, but those were based on rational, if overblown, risk assessments. Then, in late July, a month or so before he turned three, we dismantled his crib and turned it into a big-boy bed—accidentally opening fear’s floodgates.
At first, he was fine with the new bed but, not long after losing the safe confines of his crib, E became scared of “shadow monsters.” From seven-months-old until nearly three, he’d gone to bed by himself without a problem or even a nighlight. Now, he was petrified. We’d sleep-trained him without incident as a baby, but that wouldn’t work this time. This wasn’t about teaching him to self-soothe or him being whiny. Emile was feeling honest-to-goodness panic.
At first, I stayed beside him until he fell asleep, holding his hand in mine. Eventually, I made it from his bedside to the rocking chair and, for the last month, I (or my wife when I’m out of town or tied up at work) have waited in the hallway outside his room with his door open. We have a creaky house so we can’t sneak away—in fact, that time we tried to leave before he was totally asleep—and got busted in the process —may have exacerbated the problem. At least once during the hour between story-time and sleep, I’ll be called in to chase away the shadows.
We’ve tried a lot of tricks to remedy this. We bought a circus-themed bed tent at Ikea, to bring back the safe feelings of his crib without regressing to the point of rebuilding it. We bought a turtle nightlight that projects constellations onto the ceiling, and I gave him a battery-operated green glowstick/flashlight. I even tried shadow-puppetry and teaching Emile to blow raspberries at the shadows. All have helped assuage, but by no means eliminate, his fear of the dark.
It extends beyond the bedroom, too. E loves the Muppets movie—it was the first film he ever saw in the theatre. But when we watch at home, the Jack Black scenes freak him the hell out. He recently saw an unrelated overweight guy on TV and got really scared, insisting the guy was Jack. (This, despite Black singing his favourite Yo Gabba Gabba song.) Watching Muppets in Space last weekend, E had the same reaction to Jeffrey Tambor because he was a “bad guy” and made us fast-forward whenever he was on the screen.
This is a thing now—he won’t watch any Fraggle Rock scenes with the big Gorg monsters—and was none too pleased with my wife’s wicked-witch Halloween costume because he wanted her dressed as Glinda. (“Be a nice witch, mommy! Don’t say mwa-ha-ha!”)
E uses the word “scary” all the time, which is disconcerting because it never used to be a part of his life. But that’s the thing with kids: They’re constantly changing—often as soon as you’ve gotten a good handle on ‘em.
Around the ages of two and three, a child’s imagination becomes complex enough to give them anxieties. E was never afraid of the dark (or Jack Black) before because, he just didn’t give it a thought. But as his brain has increased in complexity and sophistication, he’s begun to wonder what is hiding beyond his sight. Same with daytime stuff: He’s old enough to know bad guys are supposed to be scary, and that’s enough to make him actually scared.
As a parent, you need to comfort your children but not make their anxieties worse, to acknowledge their very real fears while not accidentally cementing them. (Trying to tease or bully them out of being scared is a terrible idea.) This was the tightrope we were walking when Halloween arrived this past week.
Though we were concerned, Emile was super into it and eager to dress-up as a dragon and go trick-or-treating. (“I’m not gonna roar, I’m a nice dragon. I am gonna breathe fire, though.”) It actually helped us work on the difference between real and pretend, a fine line for toddlers. First, we prepped with a Halloween-themed Little Critter book, where scary supernatural creatures are revealed to be cute costumed friends.
On Halloween night, his first spent going door-to-door, E proved very brave walking up to strangers’ homes, despite the monster costumes and creepy decorations. Yes, candy is a powerful incentive, but E also seemed to pass a threshold. “Dragons and monsters and ghosts and tigers and owls and skeletons—that’s what Halloween is all about,” he happily informed us once we got home. “And pumpkins!” I then asked if Halloween was scary. He replied, “nope.” My wife followed up by asking if it was spooky, to which he exclaimed brightly, “yes!”
And suddenly we had progress. Though he couldn’t quite explain the difference between spooky and scary, he understood the former was pretend—and that he liked it. For a toddler, being able to verbalize an emotion means being able to gain control over it.
Of course, I still spent an hour in the hallway outside his room on Halloween night, twice called in to wave his glowstick at the dark corners. And, ultimately, all you can do to fight fears is help your child feel safe while letting them work it out their own—which, actually, is a pretty good encapsulation of parenting itself.
