"I Had No Idea It Would Be So Scary"
Why is it so hard to know when your child will be frightened by TV? There are two big issues here. One is that when our children are not under our direct supervision, they see programs we might restrict them from viewing if we knew they were watching them. The other is that, even when we are aware of what our children are watching, it is difficult for most parents to predict what will frighten them.
Why We Don't Know What They're Watching
When I was about six or seven years old my parents went out for the evening and left me with a baby-sitter. The CBS network was carrying a movie that night which dealt with a literal swarm of tarantulas taking over a small town and biting all of the inhabitants until they succumbed to the poison of the tarantulas' venom. My parents had instructed the baby-sitter to not let me watch this film, but the baby-sitter was watching it and I just went into the room and sat down. She did nothing to stop me. . . . While the scenes were a little frightening then, the feelings have remained, and every time I see a spider I think of this movie.... [O]verall, it is hard to believe that exposure to this one film fifteen years ago could have this lasting effect.
An undeniable fact of family life is that most parents do not have total control over their children's exposure to television and films. With busy, working parents, multiple TV sets in the home, and media available at schools, day care, and at the houses of friends, very few parents have the security of knowing exactly when their children are watching TV or what they're viewing. And, even if your child is not especially interested in watching scary material, there are many forces that make it more likely that your child will come upon something distressing.
Our retrospective study of college students showed that more than half of those who reported a long-term fright reaction had not particularly wanted to see the program that had caused them to be so upset. They saw it for other reasons. Often, we see what I have come to call the baby-sitter effect, which was exemplified at the beginning of this chapter.
Another frequent scenario is that older brothers and sisters are interested in a scary movie, and the younger siblings just happen to be there. One young man reported on his younger sister's fright response and said he still felt responsible for what had happened to her many years earlier:
When Poltergeist came out on cable in the early 1980s, my brother, my younger sister, and I sat down in front of the television to watch this unexpected horror film. My brother and I were fine, but my younger sister was affected by this movie in an extreme way. My sister was around ten years old when she experienced this film and it wasn't till she was thirteen that she was able to fall asleep in her bed rather than in our mother and father's .... Today, I really feel terrible for my sister that she had to go through this. Is it possible that she would be a different person today if she hadn't watched the scariest movie of all time, according to her?
Often children see frightening movies at a friend's house. Sometimes the absence of parental restrictions is coupled with peer pressure to be brave and macho:
When I was seven years old, I watched (although it felt like I witnessed) Friday the Thirteenth, Part 2. My family didn't have cable television or any movie channels but my friend Mark's family did. One day, just he and I watched Jason Voorhees chop up and mutilate a camp full of oversexed teenagers. I hadn't seen an R-rated movie before this gruesome experience. It blew me away. I stayed for the entirety of the film because I didn't want Mark to think I was a "wussy," and I was also morbidly fascinated by something I'd never been exposed to. After viewing the film, I had nightmares for weeks. I would even lie awake at night (with all the lights on) wondering how long it would take Jason and his twenty-inch blade to find me!
Even a movie promo can induce lasting fears:
When I was about eleven years old there was a movie on TV called The Burning Bed. It was, I believe, the story of an abused wife who gets fed up and douses her husband with gasoline while he's sleeping. She starts the bed on fire and he burns to death (I assume). I never watched the movie but I saw the ad for it on TV and it scared me to death .... I never really worried that someone would start my bed on fire, but I was suddenly certain that we were going to have a house fire which would eventually reach my bedroom and my bed. I would lie awake as long as I could, trying to stay alert, trying to smell the smoke that I knew was going to come creeping under my door.
Although many fright stories reveal that children's exposure to scary movies was due to chance or to the viewing choices of people around them, quite a few others tell about children who really wanted to see the movie that ultimately scared them. Many students report viewing in secret, against their parents' wishes:
When I was about ten years old my mother and father were planning to watch An American Werewolf in London on television .... I wanted to stay up and watch it with them. My mother explained to me that she did not feel that it would be a good idea. Needless to say, I was upset and determined to watch the man turn into a werewolf. They put me to bed and the movie started. I waited fifteen minutes and then sneaked into our living room. My parents could not see me because the couch was positioned with their backs to me.
The young girl who confessed this intrigue watched the movie for only about a half hour and returned to her bed without getting caught. But her fright response prevented her from pulling off her caper successfully:
That night I had an awful dream. I dreamt that a pack of werewolves was surrounding my bed. They were all drooling blood and growling. They did not jump on my bed to eat me, so I felt safe. This allowed me to dream that I was going back to sleep again. But then I realized that I had to go to the bathroom. Here was the problem: If I relieved my bodily function properly, I would be eaten and slashed by many werewolves. Therefore, I could not get off my bed. This dream seemed so real to me that I actually ended up peeing in my bed. I explained to my mother what happened. I got grounded, but we remember this episode as if it happened yesterday.
Why We Can't Tell What They're "Seeing"
Perhaps many adults would expect shows like Friday the Thirteenth and Poltergeist to be scary, at least if they saw them first. Presumably if parents had been aware that their children were viewing these shows, they might not have been surprised by their reactions. But many other offerings that produce fright seem utterly harmless. Little House on the Prairie is a prime example of a title that sounds just too family-friendly to invite parental concern. (I've noticed that students are especially embarrassed to mention that program in class discussions of their fright, particularly because of its name and reputation.) Parents who are trying to be vigilant are often misled by titles, advertising and promotional gimmicks, the presence of a particular actor, the source or studio producing a movie, or a movie's Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) rating. One concerned parent describes being mistakenly reassured:
My children had been wanting to see the movie Jumanji since it starred Robin Williams and they had enjoyed watching other Robin Williams movies like Mrs. Doubtfire. It seemed, from the previews I'd seen, to be an entertaining movie for children. It was rated PC. I hadn't heard anything negative about it, so we rented it. My thirteen-year-old thought it was funny and enjoyed it immensely. My eight-year-old was a bit fearful of it but still entertained by it. My six-year-old, who's normally very daring and adventurous, was terrified of the elephants and rhinoceroses and other huge animals chasing people through houses and refused to leave my side the rest of the day, despite my assurances that it was just a movie and couldn't really happen.
This mother was facing a problem that is confronted by most families with more than one child: the difficulty of selecting a movie that will entertain the older children without traumatizing the younger ones. I will return to this problem in a later chapter because there's no easy solution to it. For a large portion of what is available in the media, what is right for one age group is definitely wrong for another.
In addition, this mother was relying on the MPAA rating of PG: "Parental Guidance Suggested," and she assumed that the movie would be relatively mild in its impact. In a later chapter, I will discuss this rating system in more detail and explain why it is so hard to rely on movie ratings in making viewing choices for children.
Even G-rated movies, those that are supposed to be for "General Audiences," including children, often aren't that safe for young children. Most parents mistakenly assume that a G rating means there's nothing to worry about. Animated, G-rated fairy tale and adventure features provide a good example of this misunderstanding. These movies are a staple of preschooler entertainment, yet when viewed by young children, they often produce fears that last well beyond the time of viewing. I have received reports of children's persistent fears related to many of these features, from Bambi, Dumbo, and Pinocchio to Beauty and the Beast and The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Parents who report their children's reactions to these movies are often surprised by the intensity of their child's response.
Why not attack fairy tales, then, you might ask? You may have heard the argument that children's folk stories, and fairy tales, in particular, have always had scary and gruesome elements. Some well-known psychoanalysts have proposed that these stories allow children to work through "traumas that are seething in the unconscious." First, let me say that I have never seen any evidence that fairy tales have this positive effect. But even if such "unconscious" effects might occur from hearing or reading fairy tales, reading a story or being read to is very different from watching television and movies, particularly for young children.
One way in which written fairy tales differ from television and movies is in the way they are usually received by the child. Children who are old enough to read the words can pace themselves according to how much they can handle, and the story will become only as frightening as their imagination lets it be. But, in any event, most children are first exposed to fairy tales by listening to an adult read the words to them. In viewing situations, in contrast, the adult mediator is gone, and often no adult is present at all.
I remember the first time I read the book version of Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to my then four-year-old son. Although I myself had seen the movie as a child, I couldn't help being unnerved as I read aloud that the wicked queen ordered the huntsman to cut out Snow White's heart because she was jealous of the girl's beauty. I found myself doing a bit of selective editing then and there, doling out the story in smaller, gentler doses, because I was sensitive to the impact it would have. I also noticed how frightening my son found some of the visual images in the book, which were stills taken from the animated Disney feature. I was very glad he was first exposed to this story with me as a "translator" and reassuring presence, rather than having the movie or video version thrust upon him full force.
Had he first seen the movie or video, he would have seen the entire story (or all that he could take!) without editing for his needs, and the visual images would not only have been larger, they would have been in motion. Illustrations in a book are generally less frightening than motion pictures because our brains are wired to react more intensely to moving images (especially threatening images that seem to be coming toward us). I particularly remember my own fear as a child watching Snow White when the heroine was lost in the forest. What at first looked like normal trees suddenly sprouted bright yellow eyes and took on the appearance of monsters that grabbed at her as she tried unsuccessfully to escape. Animated adventure features are especially full of grotesque, evil characters who move rapidly and threateningly toward their intended victims and seemingly toward the viewing audience as well.
One young man's memory illustrates the intensity of a child's reaction to a classic Disney film:
When I was seven my sister took me to a showing of Alice in Wonderland. Throughout the movie I felt uncomfortable with the world that Alice was blundering through. One thing that really frightened me was the grinning Cheshire Cat character. Its evil smile and hissing speech had a lasting effect on me. For years afterward I was afraid of cats and don't care for them even now. But the most intense fear that I have ever experienced was the portion of the movie where Alice is captured by the Queen and her army of "card-men." When the Queen screamed, "Off with her head!" I snapped. I started to cry and hid beneath my seat, cowering from the images on the screen. I remember being unable to sleep well for about a week after the experience. My parents had to go to great lengths to assure me that no one was going to behead me while I slept.... One thing that I think had an impact on the intensity of my experience was the fact that my parents were not sitting next to me. Without them I was literally at the mercy of the images on the screen.
But why is it, you may ask, that young children respond so intensely to these apparently fun, animated, totally unrealistic movies? Don't they know (and don't we tell them often enough) that what is shown in them is totally unreal and could never happen? Isn't it unreasonable for children to be frightened by these movies that are intended mainly for their entertainment? What's going on here?
What's going on here is that young children are viewing these movies through a child's eyes. What we are seeing as adults and what they are seeing as children are, for all intents and purposes, entirely different movies. It is difficult for parents, but extremely important, to be able to see television and movies in the way their child will see them.
The young man who recalled his reaction to Alice in Wonderland showed some insight into this issue while trying to explain the intensity of his reaction:
A small child tends to believe what is presented to him and take it at face value. I took the Cheshire Cat and the beheading to be real and transferred it to my own life.
The Importance of Understanding Child Development
I became interested in studying children's fright reactions to television partly because of the unpredictability of these effects. I didn't find it especially odd that people were having nightmares from Jaws or Psycho, but it intrigued me that so many parents were perplexed about their children's reactions to movies and programs that they did not expect would frighten them. I also found it fascinating that children of different ages seemed to be frightened by different types of programs and events. It might seem logical to expect that the youngest children would be the most frightened by just about every scary image, and that as children matured, all media offerings would become less frightening. But this is not what I was observing. As children get older, some things become less frightening, but other things that have not been disturbing in the past suddenly begin to terrorize.
My approach was to turn to developmental psychology for insights. What do child psychologists know, I wondered, about how children see and reason about the world at different ages? To begin to answer this question I immersed myself in the writings of Jean Piaget, the Swiss psychologist who is generally credited with being the founder of the field of developmental psychology. Like many great researchers, Piaget stumbled onto the field that he made his life's work somewhat by accident.
Early in his career, Piaget was hired to help produce items for intelligence tests. In other words, he was developing questions that would reflect children's intellectual development. What came to fascinate Piaget more than differentiating between the smarter kids, who got the right answers, and the less smart kids, who did not, was the types of errors that young children made consistently. You might expect, for example, that up to a certain age, children would not know the right answer to a particular problem and that they therefore would be uncertain or choose a variety of wrong responses. Instead, what Piaget observed was that for some tasks, the young children who got them wrong would respond without hesitation. And not only would they be sure they were right, they would all choose the same "wrong" answer. What adults saw as the wrong answer was clearly "right" for them.
A typical task involved showing children two ball-shaped globs of clay that were the same size. After getting them to agree that both balls had the same amount of clay, Piaget would let them watch as he rolled one of the balls out into a long, thin, snake shape. Then he would ask whether they both still had the same amount of clay or whether one had more than the other. Piaget found that four- and five-year-olds usually replied without hesitation that the clay in the form of the snake had more. Nine- and ten-year-olds almost always recognized that the two globs of clay had the same amount. From observing many examples like this, Piaget became fascinated with what these younger children were seeing that their older counterparts were not, and he spent the rest of his eighty-odd years observing and chronicling how children of different ages see the world around them and make sense of it.
What, you may now be asking, does the shape of globs of clay have to do with children's fright reactions to television? Piaget did not focus on the topic of children's fears, but as I read about his research and the generalizations he made about children's thought processes, I couldn't help thinking that the types of viewing and reasoning differences Piaget observed in children would have direct effects on their emotional reactions to the images and events they received through television. What particularly fascinated me about these differences was that many of them weren't intuitively obvious. By the time we become adults, we forget many aspects of the way the world seemed to us as children.
What follows in the next few chapters is an examination of some of the major patterns that Piaget and other developmental psychologists have observed in the way children of different ages see the world and reason about it, and how these can be applied to understanding children's emotional reactions to television. In addition to explaining these concepts and giving examples, I will report on the research I have done that confirms these principles. I will also explain how you can use this information in guiding your children's viewing and helping them cope with any unwanted reactions they may have.
Of Ages, Stages, and Your Uniquely Individual Child
Before getting started on the specifics of how some basic principles of child development can help you understand your child's reactions to television, I want to inject a few words of caution about the use of age guidelines. One way in which research on child development is sometimes misunderstood is that people expect age guidelines to be absolute and inflexible. As you well know, not all children develop at exactly the same rate. Most age guidelines used in this book should be considered broad trends around which most children will group, but for which there may be many exceptions. For example, the age at which a child begins to be more frightened by real than by fantasy figures (as discussed in chapter 5) may vary somewhat from child to child. But it should be helpful to know that preschool children are generally more frightened by fantasy figures, and that by the end of elementary school most children are more frightened by things that could really happen.
Another thing to keep in mind is that although this book will focus on specific aspects of television programs, one at a time, all programs contain many elements that work together to affect the emotions of children. A fantasy program may be extremely vivid or not; it may contain eerie-sounding music or not; and it may deal with an issue that is of concern to your child at the moment of viewing or the whole idea may be entirely new. For example, a girl who we might otherwise expect to be too old or too young to react intensely to a particular type of show might be frightened because it relates to something that is currently going on in her family. In short, although we will be considering various elements of programs separately, they must be thought of as part of a whole when determining whether a particular program scares a particular child.
And, of course, we must never forget that you are the person who knows your child the best, and all the advice here should be considered in the context of what you already know about your child. Your child may be outgoing and adventurous or shy and hesitant to try new things. She may love or hate roller coasters, and she may be a sound sleeper or one whose sleep is easily disturbed. She may live in a dangerous neighborhood or in peaceful surroundings. She may or may not have already been exposed to the death or severe illness of family members. And she may already love or hate to watch scary things on television.
Finally, you may have more than one child, and even children in the same family can differ dramatically. All of the guidelines I will be providing here will need to be filtered through a knowledge of each child's personality and experiences. You may have one child for whom scary programs are a problem, and another who can't seem to get enough of them. This entire book should be helpful to you in dealing with your easily frightened child, but parts will also enhance your understanding of your thrill seekers. In that particular regard, chapters 9, 10, and 11 deal with why children like scary programs and how parents can discourage them from overexposure without accidentally making these programs more tantalizing.
With these considerations in mind, let us move on to some specifics of how young children's manner of thinking and seeing makes them respond with fright to programs and movies that few adults would expect to be traumatic.