A Halloween exploration of how to work with fear and fright as our children grow…
Are you ready for some spooky fun? How ready are you for freak-out and fearful encounters as your children grow and develop?
Are you anticipating thrills and spills with little ones, trick-or-treating…or ambushed by scary masks in the supermarket…or are you navigating the pull for older kids to engage with the latest horror movie or jump-scare game…Or do you have older teens and the fear is all YOURS as you see them go out and about at night dressed like THAT?
How do you calibrate the ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears’ equation – and get the baby-bear dosage of fright right…And what do you do- how can we show up the best when our kids have an experience that floods them – and potentially floods us – with fear?
As a parent – is fear something we have to prevent and protect our children from? We get bombarded with fear as parents by the media. Fear that schools are teaching distorted values (which they mostly are not)… Fear that our kids will be corrupted, traumatised…Scarred for life…In so many ways we are given the message that if we haven’t enabled our kids to have the perfect childhood, the perfect schooling, the perfect scores, it will be a disaster…
In this article, we’ll look at how fear belongs to us as an important human emotion – it’s function is to keep us safe. Whether that’s a fear of the dark, a fear of ghosts or monsters under the bed, or fearful, disturbing and intrusive thoughts that can recur when teens encounter things online or in real life that freak them out…
It is not fear that creates trauma…it is how we react to fearful or overwhelming events that creates trauma – in us or our children…
The Undead Pets Saga…Parent fail? Or parent opportunity?
I remember the first time our daughter saw something online that freaked her out. We were both there – and we were both blind-sided by the intensity of her reaction. She was pretty young – maybe 6 or 7 years old – and had devoured the ‘Demon Headmaster’ book series.
She’d seen the link at the end of the book to the animation on YouTube. She’d begged us to see it.
It was an advert for new series of similar books: ‘Undead Pets’. For once…because we’ve not always been hot on vetting things…we had done our due diligence and seen it…It looked pretty tame to us – a 60 second clip of cartoon ghost pets hovering in a cartoon cemetery -oooooh-oooh music. So far so totally standard… Given she’d already read one of the books and knew what to expect (or so we thought) – we opened the link and…Meltdown!
Suddenly, here was fear. Right here, right now in the room, in our daughter. She clung to us in tears and shouted to turn it off. It felt so strange and sudden. And it was hard not to feel bad about it – or even act on the temptation to belittle her reaction in an attempt to rationalise her out of her fear. ‘But you’ve seen much scarier things than this!’…
It’s interesting how when our kids are overwhelmed by strong emotion, how the contagion of that overpowering reaction can do a take-over on us…It was by no means a one-and-done event.
All the soothing in the world, didn’t stop the internal camera of her mind replaying the scene at bed-time that night.
It was an instructive brush with fear that started a number of really helpful – and important conversations at intervals over the coming days and even weeks.
Whilst we could very easily have spent that time feeling parent guilt and remorse at inadvertently exposing her to something that turned out to be very difficult and penetrating to her sense of safety… After all as parents, our core responsibility is keeping our children safe.
Having said that, as the saying goes, it is impossible for us to child-proof the world…Our job is to bring our children up in ways that ready them for the real world as it is – not how we’d like it to be. Or how they would like it to be.
One of the key lessons from that experience has served particularly well: what you see, cannot be unseen. So from that time forth, our daughter was better resourced to ask questions, and creating a pause and a choice before leaping in to looking. A valuable skill when spurred to click links or being invited by friends to see ‘gross things’ on phones…
It was also an immediately relevant platform for her to learn strategies and practical steps to take when something she was experiencing gave her that uh-oh feeling whether on-screen, on TV or out and about…And we’ve had the chance to see and celebrate her using these strategies to great effect.
Whilst there is no way I would ever endorse inviting distress into our children’s lives, when it happens, one of the most crucial reframes is that when distress and difficulty presents itself in family life, there is always an opportunity for learning and growth. It’s where we as adults, parents, carers, or educators can add true value to the lives of young people.
This sense takes us back to the origin of the word trauma – which means a wound. Of course most wounds actually heal in a physical dimension. The same is true of psychological wounds. Dr Chris Willard, Psychologist, Educational consultant, and Harvard Medical School Faculty member, memorably spoke of this to parents during the pandemic. He said that the normal response to trauma is growth. In roughly 70% of cases.
With our typical bias to threat, we all focus on post traumatic stress. And this is leapt on currently in social media where teens and young adults imbibe messages that focus on and exaggerate the impact of rupture, rather than look at repair and resilience. Post traumatic stress is a minority outcome – and more likely if we are not able to effectively debrief empathically, and experience support in processing traumatic events through our relationships.
This is something that gives me strength to draw on as a parent in the trenches of family life, and as a coach supporting parents through sometimes truly traumatic events.
Gabor Mate talks about the impact of trauma in a similar way. He defines it as an event that occurs which is overwhelming and you don’t know what to do with it. It is not the event itself, but what happens inside you as a result of what happens to you. And throughout childhood, there are experiences that are fearful and overwhelming that we are needed to empathise, stabilize, and help guide our children through so that they know what to do and how to make healthy and adaptive meanings from the intensity of the fear that they will feel.
How we respond to fear has the capacity to compound it and bury it:
- Your fear is silly / wrong / misplaced. (Dismissive)
- I am so angry that you had this experience. (Threatening, emotional)
- What made you do this thing that made you so distressed? (Blaming)
- That’ll teach you not to…(Judging)
Or open it up and release it…
- It’s OK, I’m here. Come close / have a hug…(Downregulating to safety)
- Tell me more…(Non-judgmental invitation to debrief)
- I can see how that’s a scary thing for you. (Validating their experience)
- I see how hard this is. This is your instinct keeping you safe. (Normalising fear)
- What are you feeling about it now? What worries you about it? (Unpacking, debriefing)
- What can you do about it? (Moving into designing future action, skill building)
- I am so glad you came and told me about it – It’s really brave and resourceful…(Celebrating, rewarding, encouraging).
And this is the crucial way we can help.
Culture and ritual around fear…Fear as entertainment…
Fear shows up in family life in all sorts of ways. The ritual celebration of the fearful and spooky at Halloween is an interesting one…In the UK, it has become a much more prominent and now extremely mainstream event – and we can track how this festival invites us to interact with fear, fright, life, death, and mastery of these aspects of common humanity…
With Halloween, we can see that way that it is all about celebrating the fruits of Autumn and harvest abundance, whilst also preparing to usher in the dark of winter and with that the theme of death is there too. It’s about endings…It’s also about playful ways to approach fear. From the very first moment our ancestors lit fires at night-time, humans have traded stories in the dark. Reliving adversity encountered and overcome…warning each other about dangers best avoided.
Of course, it is a festival with pagan roots, and flourishes of commercialisation…It may or may not be something that sits in alignment with our values. Nonetheless, as a cultural phenomenon, it is an event that our children will interact with in different ways. And an interesting template to think about how we as parents see our children develop in their desire to approach, avoid, and process fears.
From young children dressing up and heading out in darkness chaperoned by parents, there is an opportunity to extend their secure base in safe ways. Although thrills and spills still are part of the picture – I remember a particularly haunting rubber clown mask being worn by a fellow parent supervising a rival trick-or treat group causing quite a stir!
I have a tendency to get carried away with all things fancy dress- and have learned that opening the door with sweets for trick-or-treaters in a mask might be somewhat horrifying for little ones…
Will these chance early encounters with fear become part of a narrative of a sturdy self-hood? Something they will be able to look back on with what? Hopefully humour, interest, and accomplishment, rather than embarrassment, shame, or a sense of damage…
Later, once our children are approaching their teens, there’s the drive for mastery that kicks in – to take risks and encounter scary things in fiction, for entertainment, in shows, films, games…Looking back over family life, now our child is mid-teens, the ‘Undead pets’ episode is a thing of the past.
Together with friends there is a relish for pushing at the edges of fear…being scared has become fun…horror movies, jump-scares, and all the thrills and screams that come into the mix…
Context is king…
Of course, Halloween’s spooky thrills are not for everyone. Some kids and adults never get on with horror or the spooky stuff, and it doesn’t have to hold them back in any way at all. I have a lifelong aversion to rollercoasters. I just don’t go on them. It’s fine. I’m totally at peace with that limitation on my experience. An all-embracing fear of social interactions and social judgment from others leading to school avoidance, or a reclusive withdrawal from life is another thing entirely. But it’s still the same visceral, bottom-up fear.
Neither would it be particularly advisable for the majority of our play and entertainment to be saturated with thrill and adrenaline rushes. Fear is an important human emotion. We should not seek immunity from it in the same way that it would be unhealthy and counterproductive to try to eliminate it from our lives through controlling or avoidant behaviour.
In ‘Hold Onto Your Kids’, Gabor Mate writes about young people whose connection with caregivers becomes too distant becoming emotionally ‘invulnerable’ – cut off from their feelings, armoured, and dangerously precocious in their faux-independence. Such teenagers deal with fear and vulnerability by denying it in themselves and belittling it in others with scorn – becoming reckless for their physical and emotional safety.
Children process fear through their play. This may involve exaggeration, re-enactment, repetition. As governor of a school near London Bridge, when there was a terror attack in 2017, I remember working with the Head and an Education Psychologist to help parents understand how children process danger through their play. What that might look like, and how parents can gently reassure and disentangle fact, fiction from the playground of the fertile imagination of a child’s anxious mind and bring proportion and resilient growth – even when very real danger has come into such close proximity to children’s lived experience.
It’s really hard to predict what’s going to get under a child’s or teen’s skin. Year on year in Year 1, in the UK, kids have learned about the Great Fire of London. Human tragedy on a grand scale. However, in the year following the Pandemic and the outbreak of war in Ukraine and constant newsreels of climate change disasters, fires and floods, these stories hit home and become extremely real.
There are nursery rhymes that predict disaster ‘London Bridge is falling down’, plague ‘Ring-a ring-of roses, a pocketful of posies / Atishoo Atishoo..we all fall down…(Not so good in a pandemic)…Theatres can be very cautious about teens coming to watch the tragedies because their reactions can be unpredictable – because laughter is a ready cover for confusion, embarrassment or being disturbed by something that is outside their emotional range and maturity.
When I told my father about the Undead Pets episode, he told me about having watch hundreds of Westerns on the television when he was growing up. Plenty of cowboys shooting at Indians, axes thrown, violence, conflict, and death. But it was one scene where he saw a man collapsing after being hit in the chest that made him fearful for weeks and weeks. In his 70s he remembered the intensity of the fear, and the inexplicable nature of the origin of that fear as part of his childhood. Something about that moment on film exposed him to the reality of injury, vulnerability and the potential for death.
Sometimes, there is a child-like or teenage inability to imagine or empathize fully that must be protective to a very large extent. Intelligent children in Year 6 or 7 studying World War 1, for instance, encounter war as a concept, but rarely engage with the true sadness of death and destruction in the same way an adult would.
Conversely seeing the Combined Cadets at our daughter’s school – proudly marching on remembrance day – children in uniforms as a mother is entirely different. I know that as last year – this November, I will once more hear the silence in the wake of the Last Post, and hear the tread of their marching through the quiet streets and will be overcome by dread, fear, and sadness, as a parent looking on against the backdrop of current global conflict.
Getting it just right…tolerable stress…
As our kids get older, and want to experience the edgier side of life thought entertainment – the conversations we’ve had about past experiences of working through fear are really important to draw on. It’s helpful for them to know and be at peace with the sorts of things that freak them out – so that they can employ strategies effectively – for instance by saying ‘it’s just a mask’…’It’s just a cartoon’ ‘It’s OK I can look away’…
Sometimes they are going to be in situations where there’s an invitation for adventure – and we won’t be there. Like film-nights at friend’s houses. Ghost stories on sleepovers. Watching horror movies…It’s good to empower them to act on their boundaries themselves – and increasingly so as they pursue more independent social lives.
I must admit, in our home, we take some notice of age advisory categories. But we do flex these and take reasonably managed risks – knowing our teen, discussing, looking things up. Sometimes reviewing key bits to decide whether they’re suitable to watch together. These things are subjective -to an extent.
You can find a lot of information about the detail of films and games on Commonsense Media. And that will help to an extent. There is often a huge difference between what adults think is a suitable age to watch, and what children and teens think…However, the Incredibles 2 will freak out any child who doesn’t like the idea of the parents’ eyes going crazy in the animation. As we discovered at a classmates birthday cinema experience…
For instance, the UK rates Thelma and Louise a 15. In the US, it’s an R rating so accompanied by an adult up to 17. For us, it was all about ensuring our 15 year old daughter would not be traumatised by the rape-scene. It was a question of preparation as parents, discussion and preparation with our daughter – revisiting conversations about sex for pleasure, consent, and talking about sexual violence so that in seeing such things enacted, she would be prepared for real-world frightening and horrifying things that sadly are part of our reality. A reality we hope she will never have to inhabit – but something when ready, she can have a more mature understanding of without it making her unduly anxious.
And here’s the thing. Whilst we don’t want our kids to live in terror. No way. We do want them to have an insight into fearful things so that they can develop that necessary skill of managing risk. Teens, young adults, no matter what their gender, need to be able to take responsibility for getting home safely in the dark. They need to know what makes them more or less vulnerable and here a well-calibrated dose of fear is instructive.
A good friend of mine takes a very careful line with her children. As someone who lived under state controlled Soviet-era media into the free-for-all that was part of the jubilant emergence into democracy in Eastern Europe, she is very present to the way in which she saw things she shouldn’t see in the films and videos that flooded her country.
She still remembers the impact of the confusion and disturbance it caused her as a young teenager – and how these images and scenarios seen would intrude into her psyche. I admire the way she and her partner are especially thoughtful about vetting what their children encounter – whatever screen it’s on, whatever book they are reading.
As a coach I have also worked with parents whose children have been accidentally or otherwise exposed to pornography online – which is still far too easy and prevalent. As our Children’s Commissioner reports have confirmed.
Fear, confusion, anxiety from being exposed to disturbing content – whether horror, violence, or inappropriate sexual content which may embrace all 3 of these elements is something that can lay down deep tracks in the psyche. The openness a child or teen has to come back to us as parents is an important resource – to open up, talk things through, recognise the relevance of the potent and unpleasant feelings in the body and mind that will be coming up for them.
Being able to debrief effectively with a supportive, compassionate, reassuring parent, carer, or other, and ideally to be able to do so within 72 hours – the window in which events get stored into declarative memory – is really key. Dr Alison McClymont writes about this in her book: How to Help Your Child Cope with Everything. In this book, she adapts techniques used in the military to help protect mental health after combat experience for parents to use in family life. She calls it the ‘Extract – Express – Reflect technique.
What to watch for when fear’s here…
When we encounter mishaps and magnify them to disastrous proportions, we are not building a sense of capability, or resilience. We need to seriously manage our body language and tone when our kids disclose something that’s made them fearful or scared or disturbed. Otherwise they won’t be able to downregulate and integrate their experiences. Daniel Goleman writes about this in his book ‘ Social Intelligence’ in a memorable anecdote where he talks about a time in his own family life when his granddaughter saw a movie that frightened her.
Our complaints, resistance, blaming, instructs young people to have expectations or entitlements for things to be ‘just so’ and experience secondary stress when those expectations are disappointed.
School teachers, school leaders, librarians, are often besieged by blame and opposition coming from the prevalent culture that pressures parents into believing they have to curate the perfect upbringing that is avoidant of discomfort.
Life provides us and our children with so many points of friction. How we are able to embrace discomfort, hold the space to feel it through, open up to understanding it, and thinking it through together is the secret to building resilience. In spending too long smoothing the path, what ought to be manageable friction becomes abrasion.
When we treat fear, discomfort, upset as things to be resisted and avoided, we also inadvertently tell our kids that we don’t like these elements of life. That when they are uncomfortable, or experience fear, we go to war.
When we go into activation over their fear, we start investigating, unpicking, unpacking who did what, allocating blame…Diagnosing and dictating a path forward. It’s not surprising that fear quickly becomes something that’s not cool. That needs to go underground – otherwise they won’t be allowed to play that came, watch that show, read that book, have that experience…And they won’t come back to us next time something equally or more tricky crops up…
It’s worth knowing these points about children, teens, and stress from the U.S. National Scientific Council on the Developing Child. That there are 3 types of stress that kids and teens will be subject to. We need them to have experiences of the first two types to help build their resilience:
- Positive stress (eg pre-test, pre-performance, pre-match nerves)
- Tolerable stress (more severe but well-managed, supported – eg bereavement, serious accident, serious family illness)
- Toxic stress (prolonged, severe and not supported, low control)
- Children and adolescents are more susceptible to stress – need more recovery time.
Positive, manageable stress builds resilience.
Needs of the young person: a supportive adult, time to recover, a sense of control.
See ideas about stress and performance in The Thriving Child by Dr William Stixrud and Ned Johnson – who discuss these references to stress in more depth.
The third type is to be avoided…and we can avoid that by ensuring that we can be a non-anxious supportive presence in our children, teens, and young adults lives. And nurture the kind of relationship with our children as they grow that encourages and rewards them for coming to us and honouring us with their trust when life throws something scary and tricky their way.
Being able to seek reassurance and repair with the ruptures of life with our care-givers makes us stronger – more resourceful around our own vulnerability, and more capable for creating authentic, meaningful, intimate relationships. All of us as parents, wish for our kids to be happy, healthy, and sturdy. Unburdened by the restrictions of an over-anxious and fearful mind, and free to live and love fully. Let’s start this now.
Whether it’s the eyes on a carved pumpkin, a latex clown mask, or a teen being terrified at having seen a film they thought they were up for, but found that they weren’t…Let’s be ready, be there, and be clear and calm enough to welcome and work through fear. It’s a fundamental, universal, and useful emotion – key to our safety and survival. It’s not a disaster or wrong to ever feel it.
All feelings are welcome. They all have their place whether pleasant or not. And we can work through them and learn from them together and be stronger people with stronger bonds as a result.
I hope this helps.
Happy Halloween.
