Children Raised in Reality Are Not Afraid on Halloween or Afraid of the Dark

Halloween was always my least favorite holiday when I worked with small children. There was always some costumed person the child saw while trick-or-treating that scared him or her to death. For years I spent every Halloween comforting traumatized, crying children. One little boy had nightmares for over a week following the holiday. 

I have long wondered if Anders would find costumed people scary. He has no concept for the scary things people dress as on Halloween i.e. would seeing a person dressed as wicked witch scare you, if you had no concept in your mind of evil witches using magic to ruin your life? Would a person dressed as a witch be scary if you had no concept of magic? Some of the costumes in the windows around Los Angeles are pretty evil looking, but Anders has no real concept of evil, so I have been curious to know how he will think about these things. Will he find evil faces scary or will he just think they look weird?

I have told Anders about the holiday coming up, Halloween in which people wear costumes, and recently I took him to a costume store. He knows about the concept of wearing costumes from the Renaissance Fair (which he loves) so costumes are a pretty positive thing for him. He has shown no interest thus far in the role-play costumes that kids his age often get into. For example, he loves construction and pretends to do it every day, but when I offered to buy him a construction outfit on three different occasions he said, "No,"

At the costume store (Cinema Secrets if you know it) there were some pretty fantastic and gruesome costumes on display, one in particular, a witch, was pretty horrifying. Anders pointed to it and said, "What's that?" I said, "That's a costume for someone who wants to pretend to be a very ugly, old lady. Some people call ugly, old ladies 'witches,' and when they are pretending to be a witch they laugh like this, 'He he he he he!'" I said, "Do you think this costume is scary or or ugly or just weird?" He said, "Not scary." I said, "Do you think it's ugly?" He said, "No." I said, "Weird then?" But he had already walked off, which means his answer was, "Boring." We looked at other things. He was most interested in the makeup that made people look like they had huge wounds, but he did not think that was scary either.

Anders does not want to dress up on Halloween, though I imagine if his father or I were going to dress up he would possibly change his mind, but we have no plans to. The only costume Anders showed any interest in was a bear costume, but he didn't want to wear it and in the end just wanted a little bear figurine to play with. (He is very interested in bears right now thanks to the Disney Nature Bear documentary I bought for our plane rides over the summer.) 

A side note: Anders is not afraid of the dark. He is afraid of falling when there are no lights on, but perhaps since he has never heard of ghosts or monsters and we have spend a lot of time playing with shadows, he has always been comfortable with the dark, inside and out, and has never needed a nightlight or anything like that.

Anyway, just a development update for those of you who are interested in knowing what happens when you raise your kids without fantasy fiction! 

Conclusions About Exposing Children to Fantasy Fiction: Montessori Was (Mostly) Right

I just finished reading:
Fiction and Fictionalism
Fiction and Metaphysics
The Art of Fiction
The Romantic Manifesto
A Child's Work: The Importance of Fantasy Play
Daydreaming and Fantasy
The Kingdom of Childhood: Introductory Talks on Waldorf Education
The Uses of Enchantment
A Plague of Fantasies
Under Deadman's Skin: Discovering the Meaning of Children's Violent Play
The Secret of Childhood
The Child in the Family
The Scientist in the Crib
How Children Learn
And a bunch of Joseph Campbell talks

My conclusions about fantasy-fiction for children thus far are--

-Humans have been telling stories about talking animals and gods with magic for a long time
-These stories, when taken as truth (religion), are believed by both the child and the adult, thus there is no damage to the relationship because there has been no lying. Depending on how much the child's own rational conclusions disagree with the adults, there can be some trauma to the child's rational faculty
-These stories, when not taken as truth such as in folk stories of anthropomorphic animals, won't confuse children very much or for very long if the following conditions are met: 1) that the stories are told or read and do not have pictures 2) that the child has plenty of exposure to that real animal in addition to the anthropomorphic stories he hears
-The American childhood, with all the anthropomorphic inanimate objects and animals in movies, is extremely confusing and debilitating to young children, setting them back many years in their "folkloric realization" compared to their own ancestors and their non-western peers. How damaging this is to their self-esteem, relationships and confidence in thinking for themselves is inconclusive.

If you are interested in reading more on this subject I recommend The Romantic Manifesto by Ayn Rand and the first chapter of The Art of Fiction by Ayn Rand were the most clarifying book I read on the subject. Joseph Campbell's stuff is incredible for understanding the place of myth and stories in human lives. Daydreaming and Fantasy was well-organized and I appreciated that it its ability to help me think about fantasy and fiction, but it was full of illogical conclusions. The Secret of Childhood and The Child in the Family by Maria Montessori did a great job of helping me to understand how children think and learn. The Scientist in the Crib was good too.

What To Do About Nightmares

Don't expose young children to fantasy fiction.

I was reading the following article--

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/11/121113134926.htm

and I thought it was so INSANE. Write a letter to the monster? Give your child a special toy to help him deal with his fears about the monster? WHY ARE YOU TEACHING YOUNG CHILDREN WHO CANNOT UNDERSTAND THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN REALITY AND FICTION ABOUT MONSTERS IN THE FIRST PLACE? It's just mean.

In the world I live in, at some point between 8pm and 10pm my toddler tells me he wants to go to bed or I tell him I want to go to bed and.... we go to bed. He is not afraid of under the bed, the closet or the dark. He doesn't hesitate to walk around the house in the dark if there is something he wants in another room or to go outside when it is dark to get a toy he wants. He has had a total of three nightmares in his entire life and all three took place the week after we moved into a new house and they were about things like there being no more cookies or someone taking a toy from him. 

I listen to people talk about their children's nightmares and struggles with bedtime and irrational fears and... I feel so sad for them and for their poor, scared kids. I am happy to be raising my son the way I am!! So happy to keep discovering that a child raised the way I advised is even more amazing that I hypothesized! I wish people knew how easy and fun and just incredible and smart and capable and competent "normal" two-year-olds are. 

Update: Anders is almost 4 and he has yet to come running to my room after a bad dream. He sleeps with me some nights and in his own bed some nights. It's all up to him. During stressful times he sleeps more often with me. 

Update: Anders started getting nightmares at age seven when he started reading Harry Potter. Happily, he is old enough to understand that the nightmares are a result of reading Harry Potter and that he has to decide whether he wants to read HP or not have nightmares. The desire to read HP outweighs the desire to not have nightmares so, he accepts them. He is now almost nine years old and, though he admits to having nightmares, has never once come to my room in the middle of the night complaining or feeling too afraid to go back to sleep.

Do Your Children Really Understand that Dogs Can't Talk? More on Why I Don't Expose My Child to Fantasy

What if you talk about it with your kids and you swear that they understand the difference between fantasy and reality?

Maybe they do! Kids mature at different rates. That being said, most kids won't fail the "Now, Mary, tell me the difference between real trains and pretend trains" question the day they were exposed to the pretend trains, they will fail the question a week later, sometimes a month later.

It's the way our brains work. It has to do with information storage. (And this is about all fiction, not just fantasy fiction). I remember reading about an experiment done on adults in which a "psychologist" suggests a memory to the subject (that never happened, in this particular experiment it was "remember that time your mom lost you at the mall when you were little? She found you by the fountain.") A year later, when the subjects were asked if their moms had ever lost them as kids, almost all of them told the story they had been fed about being lost at a mall and found at a fountain.

Most people don't need a science experiment to tell them that their memories can be faulty. Most of us have had the experience of swearing something happened to us only to realize a while later that the memory actually came from a movie or book.

But back to children and fantasy.

Children becoming confused about reality is the biggest reason to question the idea of exposing a child to fantasy, but there are other reasons too.

One reason is time. A friend of mine, Andrew, pointed this out to me. He said he loved seeing what my two-year-old chooses to do with his time, like mastering how to make scrambled eggs, practicing jumping or trying to read. Every minute of his day is spent acquiring those skills he has judged as important for life. This is very different from the Standard American Two-Year-Old who thinks it is extremely important to learn the names of all the super heroes and then practices how they fight bad guys. The way I state this same idea in my Main Idea 2 essay is: the reason why children in the past were so much more mature/competent than ours is the same reason why hunter-gatherer children today are capable of so much more than ours--math. Time. They have simply spent more time learning real life skills than our children have. Eight years spent practicing being a princess or a superhero is a lot of time spent not acquiring other skills.

But perhaps real life skills aren't that important to you! Perhaps you find it adorable when Jonny pretends to be Batman and you would't trade that for the world. As a parent, you get to decide what makes parenting the most fun for you. (This is assuming the child does understand the difference between reality and fantasy though.)

Another reason, the main reason I personally don't expose my son to fantasy, is our relationship. I find my son very easy to relate to. I love hanging out with him! I love what he has to say about things. When we talk, I feel very connected to him. When I work with fictionalized kids who announce to me that their name is "Ariel" or tell me their friend Fluffy the Elf will be hanging out with them today... I don't know what to say. I lose connection with them. I can smile and call someone Ariel and I can offer someone's elf tea too, but... I am not connecting with a person. I am playing with / entertaining an adorable (stupid) pet.

For more information on this subject, see my Main Idea 2 essay. Also, John Holt writes about this well in his book Escape from Childhood. Maria Montessori writes about how children prefer to be taken seriously as well in her book The Child in the Family. Alison Gopnik writes about how children remember things (and the experiment on adults I mentioned above) in her books The Scientist in the Crib and The Philosophical Baby. 

Is Fantasy-Fiction Bad For Kids? Don't You Have to Understand Reality in Order to Be Creative With It?

Wanted to share this great article!

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201209/children-s-freedom-has-declined-so-has-their-creativity?utm_source=swissmiss&utm_campaign=cd24a79f4c-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_2660ad4d17-cd24a79f4c-393316561

Peter Gray is right on about control, external motivators and depression, but I want to know more about the role that adult-created-fantasy-for-children plays because I believe it is significant. Take a kid, let him have all the free choice he wants, but spend hours reading stories to him about people with magic and watching movies about dogs that fly and rather than using his own brain and working out his creativity muscles, he will spend the rest of the day (or week) digesting what you just read to him, trying to figure it out, the way a traumatized child would.

A child who experiences something traumatic, like seeing a car accident, will reenact this scene over and over trying to make sense of it and understand it. Processing. The child previously thought that cars don't hit each other or fly through the air but now he saw that happen and he needs to understand. So he "plays" the car accident over and over.

A child who is read a fictional story that doesn't agree with his current understand of reality reacts similarly. Children who previously thought that dogs don't fly but now saw a dog flying also need to play over and over this scene of dogs flying. Or witches casting spells. Or people with magic powers killing bad guys. The child "plays" these scenes over and over until he "understands".

Maria Montessori wrote about the detrimental effects of fiction on children in The Child in the Family. Ayn Rand echos these concerns in her essay "The Comprachicos". Many huge businesses would lose a lot of money if they are right so I can understand why the initial research on this topic was never repeated. I would love to know the role that understanding reality plays in creativity. Don't you have to understand reality in order to recreate it? If you are genuinely confused about reality... how "creative" can you be?

There is something that really doesn't make sense about a billion kids all acting the exact same way and re-enacting the exact same stories... that just can't be how creativity starts.