|
|
|
"Helping families, children and adolescents
grow well."
Braving a Scary World
From "The Heart of Parenting" column
by Emory Luce Baldwin, LCMFT
Published in the Takoma Voice, October 2008
"Why did I like being frightened? What instinctive need is satisfied by terror?
Why, indeed, do children like stories about bears, wolves and witches? Is it because something rebels
in one against the life that is too safe? Is a certain amount of danger in life a need of human beings?...
Do you instinctively need something to combat, to overcome - to, as it were, prove yourself?
Take away the wolf from the story of Red Riding Hood and would any child enjoy it? However, like most
things in life, you want to be frightened a little - but not too much!"
Agatha Christie in Agatha Christie: An Autobiography (Ballantine, 1978).
|
I have lots of great memories of my children dressing up for Halloween trick-or-treating when they were younger.
For the first few years, my son always dressed up as some kind of space man hero and my daughter was usually a
fairy princess in pink. When they were very young, my kids would sometimes be frightened by the sight of
bigger kids trick-or-treating while wearing the more ghoulish costumes. Then, only a few years later, and
my son was proudly going trick-or-treating as "a science experiment gone horribly wrong" while his younger
sister dressed herself up as "a murdered bride" carrying a bouquet of dead flowers.
What happened?!
Most little children start off wanting to feel safe and avoiding anything too scary. Very young children
usually cannot discern the differences between reality and fantasy, or between pretending and truly dangerous.
And, to be honest, this is part of what makes young children so delightful. How else could we get away with
pretending to be the tooth fairy or Santa Claus, if little kids weren't so gullible?
As they grow a bit older, children begin to learn how to tell the difference between real and pretend.
With more life experience and a greater awareness of the real world, children find out about the scary and bad
stuff that really does happen in the world. There really are some bad people who want to hurt other people.
Sometimes, people really die. Life is often unpredictable, and terrible things can happen that nobody can prevent.
This larger awareness of tragedy and injustice in the world is reflected in how older children play.
Kids often relish the chance to make up and act out the most scary scenarios. Their play can even give parents the
willies, such as when little Max wants to dress up as "Nearly Headless Nick" instead of being a
firefighter or Nellie.
This pretend play, though, is one way for children to prepare themselves to live courageously in a
sometimes scary world. For one thing, pretending to be a bad guy, or reading scary books, allows kids the
vicarious experience of what it is like to be cruel and uncaring-while "just pretending." This is vitally
important, because part of making the choice to be kind comes from learning about what it is like to be cruel.
The other purpose of pretend scary play is to give children practice in growing their courage. One of the
most important lessons that children have to learn as they grow up is how to live courageously even when
there is so much to fear in the world. From thunder and lightening to barking dogs; from monsters under the
bed to mean kids on the play ground; from worries about getting hurt to worries about somebody you love
dying-there is a lot to be afraid of out there. The more children learn about what is scary in the world,
the more children need to grow their courage bigger to deal with it..
Living successfully in the world ultimately means living life with courage. I define courage as the sense that
"I don't always know what I'll do if something bad happens, but I can figure it out and deal with it somehow."
Helping children grow their courage is just about the most important thing a parent can do for a child.
Whether a child needs to grow their courage in order to go to sleep alone in the dark, or to be able to
walk up to another kid and start talking to them, or to be able to deal with the terrible sadness of
moving to a new town or learning to live without a Mom or a Dad-every child needs to find out that
they have what it takes to do hard things and to be ok. Instead of urging children to "get over"
their fears, we can encourage them to grow their courage so that they have the confidence to believe that
they can figure out how to deal with any problem or scary situation that life presents them with.
As Agatha Christie noted in her autobiography, there is something that draws all of us-even when we are children-to challenge ourselves, to face fearful situations to struggle against and overcome and find out that we are, after all, brave enough to live in this scary world.
Emory Luce Baldwin, LCMFT, is both an experienced parent educator with the Parent Encouragement Program (PEP)
and a Family Therapist working with families with children and adolescents in Silver Spring and Kensington.
For more information about PEP classes and programs, call 301-929-8824 or visit
www.ParentEncouragement.org.
To contact Emory, call 301-588-1451 or e-mail her at
emory@emorylucebaldwin.com.
|
