Re: "Mommy, I'm Scared": How TV and Movies Frighten Children
Posted: Thu Oct 24, 2013 1:48 am
CHAPTER SEVEN: When Words Won't Work
How to Help a Frightened Preschooler
"You Can Talk Till You're Blue in the Face"
An early study of children and fear tells the story of the young child who sat down and classified fairy-tale characters as "real" or "unreal." It was an ambitious attempt to overcome his fear, but it didn't work. He was still scared of them regardless of their category. As we saw in chapter 5, it takes a long time for children to fully understand the true meaning of the difference between fantasy and reality. To a very young child, just because something is make-believe, it doesn't mean it can't come and get you in the night!
But many parents think telling a young child that a television story is not real helps their child overcome his fears. When my colleagues and I questioned parents of preschoolers in a survey, most of them said they used that type of explanation when coping with their child's TV fears.
The fact is, young children usually don't find such words reassuring. One way my colleagues and I verified this was to conduct an experiment. We took a scene from The Wizard of Oz that many children find especially scary: Dorothy is in the tower of the Wicked Witch of the West and the witch tells Dorothy that if she doesn't give up the ruby slippers, she will be dead by the time the hourglass is empty.
We showed this scene to both preschool children and nine- to eleven-year-olds. Before they saw it, some children were told to remember, while watching, that it's just a story that's make-believe, that witches are pretend, and that the witch is just a regular person dressed up in a costume. Other children were not given these instructions.
After watching the scene, the children were asked how they had felt while watching it. Did the remember-it's-not-real instructions help children feel less scared? Not the children in the preschool group. Yet the same instructions did make the older children less fearful.
One thing I find really fascinating is that many children are wiser than their parents in knowing what helps them when they are frightened. When my colleagues and I asked children to indicate how helpful different methods would be in making them feel better if they were scared by something on TV, preschoolers thought "tell yourself it's not real" would be the least effective of all the strategies, while nine- to eleven-year-olds thought it would be far and away the best strategy.
Telling yourself it's not real is one of several widely used fear-reducing strategies that are more effective for older children than for younger ones. These methods, which are based on reasoning, usually involve attempts to help the child view the frightening thing in a different light. I refer to these as "verbal strategies" because they require children to process verbal information. Most verbal strategies are ineffective for young children for two reasons. One reason is related to some of the issues I raised in chapter 3 when I talked about how young children's attention is dominated by visual images and things that are easily perceived. As we saw when studying the effect of visual images, the ability to reason about things that are less obvious is very immature in young children, so the ability to use abstract thoughts to overpower frightening images is very weak.
A mother recently told me about the difficulty she had reassuring her five-year-old son who was frightened by the movie Ghostbusters. When she tried to explain that ghosts could not come through walls, he replied, "But you're wrong, Mom. I saw it with my own eyes!" This mother's explanation was powerless against the force of the compelling visual images in the movie.
The other problem with verbal strategies is that they rely on the comprehension of words and sentences. Not only are younger children less familiar with the meanings of individual words, they also are less adept at combining word meanings into an overall understanding of a message. Just as we saw that younger children may focus on part of a visual image and ignore the rest of it, they sometimes respond so strongly to a single word that they miss the rest of the sentence.
Another experiment my colleagues and I conducted is a case in point. The results surprised us -- and taught us something about the complexities of communicating with preschoolers. Our initial idea was that if we provided children with accurate and reassuring information about something that seemed scary in a movie, the movie would become less frightening. We used the famous snake-pit encounter in Raiders of the Lost Ark as our scary scene. Before watching the scene, children of different ages were shown an educational video that tried to convey the fact that most snakes are actually harmless. In the video, the narrator uses the sentence, "Although a few snakes are poisonous, most of them are not."
We expected the video to reduce older children's fear while watching the movie. We also felt it would probably not help the preschoolers because their visceral reaction to the snakes in the movie would outweigh their ability to benefit from the reassuring information. What we discovered was that when these young children heard the word "poisonous," they effectively ignored the rest of the sentence. That word struck such a responsive chord that the intended meaning of the sentence was lost. And not only was this information not helpful to preschoolers -- it actually made them more scared! When confronted by the scary visuals in the movie, these children were apparently more sensitive to the danger of snakes than the other children their age who had not viewed the educational video. Our attempt to make these children feel better had the opposite effect.
This is a very good example of the way well-meaning efforts to reduce fear can backfire. What we've learned from this and other studies is how to create explanations that are more suited to a young child's needs. I'll talk in chapter 8 about making explanations more effective even for preschoolers, but in this chapter I'll focus on the techniques that younger children prefer and the ones that work best for them.
What Comforts little Ones? -- First, a Hug
As you might expect from the preceding discussion, the techniques that work for young children do not involve words or mental acrobatics. Simple strategies involving physical comfort, warmth, and closeness are probably the most effective. The same preschoolers who reported that telling themselves it's not real would be ineffective said that getting something to eat or drink or holding a blanket or cuddly toy would help them the most. And of all the techniques we asked children to rate for effectiveness, the one endorsed by the most children is sitting by mom or dad. Children of all ages like touching, holding on to, or being near a warm, caring adult when they are frightened, and this surely has already been demonstrated by the many accounts in this book of children seeking out their parents or even sleeping with them after seeing a scary movie.
An interesting experiment was recently reported in which preschoolers watched a scary television movie with or without their older sister or brother. The researchers found that more than half of the sibling pairs talked about how scary the program was while watching the movie, and more than a third of the older siblings actively tried to comfort their little sisters and brothers by offering words of reassurance, a hug, or a hand to hold. It is not surprising, then, that children who watched with their older siblings were significantly less frightened and enjoyed the program significantly more than those who watched it alone.
In the absence of other real people, young children often choose favorite blankets and cuddly toys for comfort, warmth, and even protection. Sometimes they do this to an exaggerated degree:
What our research suggests is that a glass of water, a hug, and the comforting attention of a parent or caregiver is often helpful, and you're better off simply reassuring your preschool child that nothing bad will happen and getting his mind off the topic than trying to explain the specifics of why he is not in danger. For children at this age, providing them with warmth (literally or figuratively) is the best place to start:
Often parents are surprised when their rational explanations are not effective with their preschoolers:
On the Family Bed, and Eating Your Troubles Away
You may have noticed that some of the techniques that young children prefer are controversial, and you may worry that they risk producing unwanted side effects. For example, many people argue that if children use food to comfort themselves during stress, these habits may come back to haunt them later in terms of obesity or eating disorders. Obviously, this is not what you would want to happen. A drink or a small snack during an acute anxiety state should not be repeated endlessly. But the occasional use of food or drink in this context may be very effective in the short run. Emotions such as fear are felt more intensely on an empty stomach, the process of eating may itself be distracting and is often pleasant, and a warm drink may take the chill off that scary feeling. Of course, efforts should be made to avoid making unscheduled fear-induced snacks a regular thing.
"What may be even more controversial about what young children like to do when they're scared is the issue of sleeping in their parents' bed after a nightmare. Experts differ, sometimes vehemently, on whether this should ever be allowed. The girl whose intense reaction to The Elephant Man was reported in chapter 3 wanted to sleep with her parents but was forbidden to do so on the advice of her pediatrician. This physician went so far as to tell her parents to leave her to cry alone in her bed so that she wouldn't become too dependent on them. She reported that neither she nor her parents slept very much for two years after the movie, but that her parents rewarded her for every night she did not wake them up, and she was eventually able to sleep through the night.
I do not believe that there is a single right or wrong answer to the question of letting your child sleep with you after a nightmare. As reports in this book show, children are joining their parents in bed much more frequently than most parents are willing to admit. Whether this is a good idea for your family depends on many things, including, of course, whether you think this is acceptable behavior and how it affects your own ability to get a good night's sleep. The risk, of course, is that it may become a habit that is difficult to break.
Although the family-bed issue is a controversial one, it seems clear that ignoring, belittling, or punishing children because of their TV-induced fears is a bad idea. Parents who acknowledge their children's fears and help manage them lay the groundwork for a sense of mutual trust and a closeness that will be of use in a variety of other emotional situations. The young woman who suffered Elephant Man nightmares offered these final thoughts:
Cutting Out or Cutting Down the Stimulation
Young children who are scared will often try to get away from what's scaring them. If it's television, they may simply leave the room or turn off the TV. If it's a movie, they might scream to be taken out of the theater. That screaming in the theater serves a purpose -- by disturbing other viewers, it forces you to leave the theater whether you want to or not.
Trust your crying child: Do not hesitate to remove your child from the scene (or to remove the scary scene from your child). Sometimes parents wonder whether this is a good idea. They hope that if their child will only stay to see the movie through to its happy ending, the fear will go away, and all will be well. Under certain circumstances this approach may work for older children, but there's a good reason it won't work for preschoolers. Very young children are not adept at putting sequences of scenes together in terms of cause and effect: Their fright response to the evil, grotesque monster will not necessarily be reduced by the knowledge that he was killed at the end. Their vivid visual memory may replay and replay the scary scene, whether or not they see the ending. So your best bet is to limit your child's exposure to the program or movie altogether and get him involved in something else as quickly as possible.
One advantage when dealing with preschoolers in this situation is that they are more easily distracted than older children by participation in other activities. With a smaller brain capacity, it is harder for them to keep those horrid events in mind while at the same time focusing on a new activity. Find something pleasurable and distracting to do as soon as possible, and as long as the child seems happy and comfortable, don't feel the necessity of reminding him of his trauma. In many ways, for the preschooler, out of sight is out of mind; don't hesitate to capitalize on this fact.
Another thing young children sometimes do when watching something scary on TV is to stay in the situation, but reduce their exposure to what's troubling them. Some children cover their eyes and peek through their fingers; some peek around a corner or over a pillow; some cover their ears. What they are doing here is exposing themselves to bits and pieces of the program rather than the whole thing. Research shows that these techniques can actually reduce younger children's fright while viewing scary programs. In some cases these activities simply cut down on the scary sights and sounds children receive. In others, they make them feel that they are more in control.
Gradual Exposure in Manageable Doses
Another technique that often works for younger children is referred to as "desensitization." Visual desensitization involves brief exposures to mild versions of something the child finds frightening. As the child becomes comfortable with the mildest version, he then sees a slightly stronger version, with the intensity continuing to increase gradually and only at the rate he can handle. In the experiment we did with Raiders of the Lost Ark we also explored whether we could make the snake scene less frightening by desensitizing children to the visual image of snakes. We created a video that showed a series of snakes -- first small ones shown from a distance and then larger ones shot from close range. At first the images of snakes were taken from still photos, but as the video progressed, the snakes were shown moving more and more. Children who saw this video were less frightened by the snake-pit scene from the Raiders movie than children who had not been gradually exposed to snake visuals. This technique was effective for preschoolers as well as older elementary-school children. Other researchers have found similar results by allowing children to hold rubber replicas of spiders or showing them real lizards and worms before they saw scary movies involving these creatures.
My colleagues and I have also taken on The Incredible Hulk, using segments of a Mister Rogers' Neighborhood episode intended to reduce children's fear of the Hulk. After children had seen a video of actor Lou Ferrigno having his Hulk makeup applied -- a much slower and more understandable transformation than the one in the program -- they were less afraid while watching an Incredible Hulk episode.
That's fine for the laboratory, but how can parents perform visual desensitization at home? That depends on what your child was scared by. If it was an animal, there are many nature videos and realistic toys that could allow you to gradually introduce your child to the animal in an unthreatening context. A visit to a zoo or pet shop might allow your child to see the animal live -- and harmless. For other frightening things, parents might consider books as a way of desensitizing. There are many picture books on the market to help children get over various fears.
Parents themselves have devised all kinds of methods. One mother reported giving her child control of the remote when he was a little scared but wanted to keep watching a video. He would fast-forward his way through parts of movies he found scary. Over time, though, he got used to those scenes and was able to view them in their entirety. Another mother said her preschooler would leave the room during the scene in Aladdin when the evil Jafar turns into a huge snake. The boy would remain within earshot so that he could follow the story. Gradually he began staying in the room for longer periods, and now he doesn't leave at all. Both of these stories are examples of mastering fear through desensitization.
A word of caution: Desensitization should only be used when the child really wants to see a scary program or will be exposed to it anyway. A child who is truly traumatized by a program may not be able to view even small portions of it without getting upset. Attempts to desensitize a child in this situation may well make things worse. In these cases, I would recommend avoiding the program or movie entirely. In some cases this will mean avoiding even the opening credits of the program or promos for the movie.
Magical and Mystical Remedies and Rituals
A final set of techniques that preschoolers like may seem totally irrational to the adult, although they do have their own logic in a child's mind. Here I'm talking about the various self-protective rituals children engage in to make themselves feel less vulnerable, usually when they go to bed.
First, there is the repetitive checking to see that the evil being from the television show is not hiding in the closet, under the bed, or behind the curtains. Then there is the defensive posture taken in the bed: Some children insist on facing the door for protection; others need to have their back to the door. Many children need to sleep with the light or a night-light on. Some children bring weapons of their own to bed just in case (one young man claimed to have slept with his baseball bat for years). And there's also the defensive gear, such as the blanket used to ward off vampires that was mentioned in chapter 1. Children can be very creative in selecting their methods of feeling more secure. I don't see a problem with these devices as long as they don't interfere with the child's (or his roommates') ability to get a healthy night's sleep.
Sometimes magic is invoked:
There are actually products you can buy that have eased the fears of many children. Many have found Native American dream catchers helpful. These are woven circular hangings which, according to legend, catch the bad dreams before they reach the child. Many children feel secure with a dream catcher nearby and report that it does keep the bad dreams away. From time to time I have seen products on the market that advertise themselves as monster blockers or ghost resistors. Children or their parents simply spray these liquids in the closet or the corners of the room, wherever the bad guys are expected to be hiding. Many parents and children report that this type of approach does keep the demons at bay.
The principle here is that the child has to believe that the method or the ritual will keep him safe, and the parent usually has to be willing to go along with the premise. This whole approach may sound bizarre to rational parents who believe that buying into the ritual validates the fear and implies that the demon is real. But you can go along with this ritual without explicitly endorsing the reality status of the evil being. The fear is real -- and it's the fear that you're dealing with. You can say, "I know there are no witches, but we can check the closet anyway if it makes you feel better."
An Ounce of Prevention
The methods I've described in this chapter are those that preschool children say they prefer and that have been shown to be effective for many children. Obviously, though, it is difficult to know which one will work best for a particular child and a particular program. Some children's fright may be so intense that these first-line techniques will not be sufficient. Sometimes, for example, the child's experience is truly traumatic or the scary aspect of a particular program comes just at the time a child is dealing with a related, troubling real-life issue. If your child's reaction does not abate over time and truly interferes with his or her day-to-day activities, don't be afraid to contact your family physician or a counselor, who can help your child deal with the problem in more depth.
Remember, too, that some of these fears will take a while to subside, but most will become manageable over time. It's good also to remember that many children hide their fright from their parents because they want to appear more grown-up or they're afraid they might suffer future restrictions. What is important is your warm and caring response. What I've noticed in the retrospective reports is that the children who have suffered the most or who have suffered the longest are those who didn't confide in their parents or whose parents derided their fears or didn't take them seriously.
Finally, it is very clear that efforts at prevention are well worth the hassle when weighed against the difficulty of reassuring a young child who has been frightened by something on TV or in a movie. As I've said throughout this book, many of these responses are remarkably intense, and they can be very hard to undo. If you happen to be there when your young child is viewing something potentially frightening, you can watch for signs of fear. Believe it or not, a child won't always say, "Mommy, I'm scared!" -- but you may get a grateful nod if you ask whether you should turn the TV off now. If you're certain a show is frightening, trust your judgment and turn it off. Even if the child does not appear scared or admit to being frightened at the time, things might look different in the middle of the night.
How to Help a Frightened Preschooler
When I was five years old, I was very scared after watching the movie The Wizard of Oz. I was terrified of the Wicked Witch of the West. I thought she was hiding in my closet or under my bed; I figured that sooner or later she would jump out and say, "I'll get you, my pretty!" and send the flying monkeys after me. My dad tried to calm me by explaining that there were no witches; furthermore, there wasn't enough room for one under my bed or in my closet. He explained that monkeys can't really fly or hurt little girls; besides, no monkey would be able to get into the house since the doors were locked. Unfortunately, although my father's arguments seem perfectly logical now, they were useless when I was five years old. I was totally unable to grasp the fact that witches were the result of a movie producer's imagination and nothing to be feared. Logical explanations were futile; I still made my dad check my closet and bed for witches before I would go to sleep.
"You Can Talk Till You're Blue in the Face"
An early study of children and fear tells the story of the young child who sat down and classified fairy-tale characters as "real" or "unreal." It was an ambitious attempt to overcome his fear, but it didn't work. He was still scared of them regardless of their category. As we saw in chapter 5, it takes a long time for children to fully understand the true meaning of the difference between fantasy and reality. To a very young child, just because something is make-believe, it doesn't mean it can't come and get you in the night!
But many parents think telling a young child that a television story is not real helps their child overcome his fears. When my colleagues and I questioned parents of preschoolers in a survey, most of them said they used that type of explanation when coping with their child's TV fears.
The fact is, young children usually don't find such words reassuring. One way my colleagues and I verified this was to conduct an experiment. We took a scene from The Wizard of Oz that many children find especially scary: Dorothy is in the tower of the Wicked Witch of the West and the witch tells Dorothy that if she doesn't give up the ruby slippers, she will be dead by the time the hourglass is empty.
We showed this scene to both preschool children and nine- to eleven-year-olds. Before they saw it, some children were told to remember, while watching, that it's just a story that's make-believe, that witches are pretend, and that the witch is just a regular person dressed up in a costume. Other children were not given these instructions.
After watching the scene, the children were asked how they had felt while watching it. Did the remember-it's-not-real instructions help children feel less scared? Not the children in the preschool group. Yet the same instructions did make the older children less fearful.
One thing I find really fascinating is that many children are wiser than their parents in knowing what helps them when they are frightened. When my colleagues and I asked children to indicate how helpful different methods would be in making them feel better if they were scared by something on TV, preschoolers thought "tell yourself it's not real" would be the least effective of all the strategies, while nine- to eleven-year-olds thought it would be far and away the best strategy.
Telling yourself it's not real is one of several widely used fear-reducing strategies that are more effective for older children than for younger ones. These methods, which are based on reasoning, usually involve attempts to help the child view the frightening thing in a different light. I refer to these as "verbal strategies" because they require children to process verbal information. Most verbal strategies are ineffective for young children for two reasons. One reason is related to some of the issues I raised in chapter 3 when I talked about how young children's attention is dominated by visual images and things that are easily perceived. As we saw when studying the effect of visual images, the ability to reason about things that are less obvious is very immature in young children, so the ability to use abstract thoughts to overpower frightening images is very weak.
A mother recently told me about the difficulty she had reassuring her five-year-old son who was frightened by the movie Ghostbusters. When she tried to explain that ghosts could not come through walls, he replied, "But you're wrong, Mom. I saw it with my own eyes!" This mother's explanation was powerless against the force of the compelling visual images in the movie.
The other problem with verbal strategies is that they rely on the comprehension of words and sentences. Not only are younger children less familiar with the meanings of individual words, they also are less adept at combining word meanings into an overall understanding of a message. Just as we saw that younger children may focus on part of a visual image and ignore the rest of it, they sometimes respond so strongly to a single word that they miss the rest of the sentence.
Another experiment my colleagues and I conducted is a case in point. The results surprised us -- and taught us something about the complexities of communicating with preschoolers. Our initial idea was that if we provided children with accurate and reassuring information about something that seemed scary in a movie, the movie would become less frightening. We used the famous snake-pit encounter in Raiders of the Lost Ark as our scary scene. Before watching the scene, children of different ages were shown an educational video that tried to convey the fact that most snakes are actually harmless. In the video, the narrator uses the sentence, "Although a few snakes are poisonous, most of them are not."
We expected the video to reduce older children's fear while watching the movie. We also felt it would probably not help the preschoolers because their visceral reaction to the snakes in the movie would outweigh their ability to benefit from the reassuring information. What we discovered was that when these young children heard the word "poisonous," they effectively ignored the rest of the sentence. That word struck such a responsive chord that the intended meaning of the sentence was lost. And not only was this information not helpful to preschoolers -- it actually made them more scared! When confronted by the scary visuals in the movie, these children were apparently more sensitive to the danger of snakes than the other children their age who had not viewed the educational video. Our attempt to make these children feel better had the opposite effect.
This is a very good example of the way well-meaning efforts to reduce fear can backfire. What we've learned from this and other studies is how to create explanations that are more suited to a young child's needs. I'll talk in chapter 8 about making explanations more effective even for preschoolers, but in this chapter I'll focus on the techniques that younger children prefer and the ones that work best for them.
What Comforts little Ones? -- First, a Hug
As you might expect from the preceding discussion, the techniques that work for young children do not involve words or mental acrobatics. Simple strategies involving physical comfort, warmth, and closeness are probably the most effective. The same preschoolers who reported that telling themselves it's not real would be ineffective said that getting something to eat or drink or holding a blanket or cuddly toy would help them the most. And of all the techniques we asked children to rate for effectiveness, the one endorsed by the most children is sitting by mom or dad. Children of all ages like touching, holding on to, or being near a warm, caring adult when they are frightened, and this surely has already been demonstrated by the many accounts in this book of children seeking out their parents or even sleeping with them after seeing a scary movie.
An interesting experiment was recently reported in which preschoolers watched a scary television movie with or without their older sister or brother. The researchers found that more than half of the sibling pairs talked about how scary the program was while watching the movie, and more than a third of the older siblings actively tried to comfort their little sisters and brothers by offering words of reassurance, a hug, or a hand to hold. It is not surprising, then, that children who watched with their older siblings were significantly less frightened and enjoyed the program significantly more than those who watched it alone.
In the absence of other real people, young children often choose favorite blankets and cuddly toys for comfort, warmth, and even protection. Sometimes they do this to an exaggerated degree:
I would protect and calm myself by putting every single stuffed animal I owned on top of my bed as I slept; this meant about fifty stuffed animals on top of me.
What our research suggests is that a glass of water, a hug, and the comforting attention of a parent or caregiver is often helpful, and you're better off simply reassuring your preschool child that nothing bad will happen and getting his mind off the topic than trying to explain the specifics of why he is not in danger. For children at this age, providing them with warmth (literally or figuratively) is the best place to start:
A technique I used to cope with my fears was to make hot chocolate with my mother and talk about "happy things."
Often parents are surprised when their rational explanations are not effective with their preschoolers:
My mom claims that one calm warm summer night, she and my father felt like watching a scary film, Creature from the Black Lagoon. I must have been about four to five years old, and they figured I would have no problem watching because I was with them. Their rationale was, "Hey, he's with us, so we can explain to him that none of this is real." After maybe the first five minutes of the film, when the creature pops out of the pond, I maniacally began to cry my eyes out, and would not stop until my father turned off the television. Mother tells me that no matter how much they tried to explain to me that what was on TV was make-believe, I was still shaking. Her only option was to stay up with me all night, touching me and singing to me softly.
On the Family Bed, and Eating Your Troubles Away
You may have noticed that some of the techniques that young children prefer are controversial, and you may worry that they risk producing unwanted side effects. For example, many people argue that if children use food to comfort themselves during stress, these habits may come back to haunt them later in terms of obesity or eating disorders. Obviously, this is not what you would want to happen. A drink or a small snack during an acute anxiety state should not be repeated endlessly. But the occasional use of food or drink in this context may be very effective in the short run. Emotions such as fear are felt more intensely on an empty stomach, the process of eating may itself be distracting and is often pleasant, and a warm drink may take the chill off that scary feeling. Of course, efforts should be made to avoid making unscheduled fear-induced snacks a regular thing.
"What may be even more controversial about what young children like to do when they're scared is the issue of sleeping in their parents' bed after a nightmare. Experts differ, sometimes vehemently, on whether this should ever be allowed. The girl whose intense reaction to The Elephant Man was reported in chapter 3 wanted to sleep with her parents but was forbidden to do so on the advice of her pediatrician. This physician went so far as to tell her parents to leave her to cry alone in her bed so that she wouldn't become too dependent on them. She reported that neither she nor her parents slept very much for two years after the movie, but that her parents rewarded her for every night she did not wake them up, and she was eventually able to sleep through the night.
I do not believe that there is a single right or wrong answer to the question of letting your child sleep with you after a nightmare. As reports in this book show, children are joining their parents in bed much more frequently than most parents are willing to admit. Whether this is a good idea for your family depends on many things, including, of course, whether you think this is acceptable behavior and how it affects your own ability to get a good night's sleep. The risk, of course, is that it may become a habit that is difficult to break.
Although the family-bed issue is a controversial one, it seems clear that ignoring, belittling, or punishing children because of their TV-induced fears is a bad idea. Parents who acknowledge their children's fears and help manage them lay the groundwork for a sense of mutual trust and a closeness that will be of use in a variety of other emotional situations. The young woman who suffered Elephant Man nightmares offered these final thoughts:
My parents and I agree that they should not have followed my pediatrician's advice. Having to deal with my fears alone clearly made them worse; in retrospect, my parents wish they had been more comforting, and they told me never to leave my own children unconsoled.
Cutting Out or Cutting Down the Stimulation
Young children who are scared will often try to get away from what's scaring them. If it's television, they may simply leave the room or turn off the TV. If it's a movie, they might scream to be taken out of the theater. That screaming in the theater serves a purpose -- by disturbing other viewers, it forces you to leave the theater whether you want to or not.
Trust your crying child: Do not hesitate to remove your child from the scene (or to remove the scary scene from your child). Sometimes parents wonder whether this is a good idea. They hope that if their child will only stay to see the movie through to its happy ending, the fear will go away, and all will be well. Under certain circumstances this approach may work for older children, but there's a good reason it won't work for preschoolers. Very young children are not adept at putting sequences of scenes together in terms of cause and effect: Their fright response to the evil, grotesque monster will not necessarily be reduced by the knowledge that he was killed at the end. Their vivid visual memory may replay and replay the scary scene, whether or not they see the ending. So your best bet is to limit your child's exposure to the program or movie altogether and get him involved in something else as quickly as possible.
One advantage when dealing with preschoolers in this situation is that they are more easily distracted than older children by participation in other activities. With a smaller brain capacity, it is harder for them to keep those horrid events in mind while at the same time focusing on a new activity. Find something pleasurable and distracting to do as soon as possible, and as long as the child seems happy and comfortable, don't feel the necessity of reminding him of his trauma. In many ways, for the preschooler, out of sight is out of mind; don't hesitate to capitalize on this fact.
Another thing young children sometimes do when watching something scary on TV is to stay in the situation, but reduce their exposure to what's troubling them. Some children cover their eyes and peek through their fingers; some peek around a corner or over a pillow; some cover their ears. What they are doing here is exposing themselves to bits and pieces of the program rather than the whole thing. Research shows that these techniques can actually reduce younger children's fright while viewing scary programs. In some cases these activities simply cut down on the scary sights and sounds children receive. In others, they make them feel that they are more in control.
Gradual Exposure in Manageable Doses
Another technique that often works for younger children is referred to as "desensitization." Visual desensitization involves brief exposures to mild versions of something the child finds frightening. As the child becomes comfortable with the mildest version, he then sees a slightly stronger version, with the intensity continuing to increase gradually and only at the rate he can handle. In the experiment we did with Raiders of the Lost Ark we also explored whether we could make the snake scene less frightening by desensitizing children to the visual image of snakes. We created a video that showed a series of snakes -- first small ones shown from a distance and then larger ones shot from close range. At first the images of snakes were taken from still photos, but as the video progressed, the snakes were shown moving more and more. Children who saw this video were less frightened by the snake-pit scene from the Raiders movie than children who had not been gradually exposed to snake visuals. This technique was effective for preschoolers as well as older elementary-school children. Other researchers have found similar results by allowing children to hold rubber replicas of spiders or showing them real lizards and worms before they saw scary movies involving these creatures.
My colleagues and I have also taken on The Incredible Hulk, using segments of a Mister Rogers' Neighborhood episode intended to reduce children's fear of the Hulk. After children had seen a video of actor Lou Ferrigno having his Hulk makeup applied -- a much slower and more understandable transformation than the one in the program -- they were less afraid while watching an Incredible Hulk episode.
That's fine for the laboratory, but how can parents perform visual desensitization at home? That depends on what your child was scared by. If it was an animal, there are many nature videos and realistic toys that could allow you to gradually introduce your child to the animal in an unthreatening context. A visit to a zoo or pet shop might allow your child to see the animal live -- and harmless. For other frightening things, parents might consider books as a way of desensitizing. There are many picture books on the market to help children get over various fears.
Parents themselves have devised all kinds of methods. One mother reported giving her child control of the remote when he was a little scared but wanted to keep watching a video. He would fast-forward his way through parts of movies he found scary. Over time, though, he got used to those scenes and was able to view them in their entirety. Another mother said her preschooler would leave the room during the scene in Aladdin when the evil Jafar turns into a huge snake. The boy would remain within earshot so that he could follow the story. Gradually he began staying in the room for longer periods, and now he doesn't leave at all. Both of these stories are examples of mastering fear through desensitization.
A word of caution: Desensitization should only be used when the child really wants to see a scary program or will be exposed to it anyway. A child who is truly traumatized by a program may not be able to view even small portions of it without getting upset. Attempts to desensitize a child in this situation may well make things worse. In these cases, I would recommend avoiding the program or movie entirely. In some cases this will mean avoiding even the opening credits of the program or promos for the movie.
Magical and Mystical Remedies and Rituals
A final set of techniques that preschoolers like may seem totally irrational to the adult, although they do have their own logic in a child's mind. Here I'm talking about the various self-protective rituals children engage in to make themselves feel less vulnerable, usually when they go to bed.
First, there is the repetitive checking to see that the evil being from the television show is not hiding in the closet, under the bed, or behind the curtains. Then there is the defensive posture taken in the bed: Some children insist on facing the door for protection; others need to have their back to the door. Many children need to sleep with the light or a night-light on. Some children bring weapons of their own to bed just in case (one young man claimed to have slept with his baseball bat for years). And there's also the defensive gear, such as the blanket used to ward off vampires that was mentioned in chapter 1. Children can be very creative in selecting their methods of feeling more secure. I don't see a problem with these devices as long as they don't interfere with the child's (or his roommates') ability to get a healthy night's sleep.
Sometimes magic is invoked:
For as long as I can remember, I have been horribly terrified of horror films. My earliest memory of fear is when I used to have my father come into my room before bedtime, and cast a "magic spell" that would keep my room safe from monsters.
There are actually products you can buy that have eased the fears of many children. Many have found Native American dream catchers helpful. These are woven circular hangings which, according to legend, catch the bad dreams before they reach the child. Many children feel secure with a dream catcher nearby and report that it does keep the bad dreams away. From time to time I have seen products on the market that advertise themselves as monster blockers or ghost resistors. Children or their parents simply spray these liquids in the closet or the corners of the room, wherever the bad guys are expected to be hiding. Many parents and children report that this type of approach does keep the demons at bay.
The principle here is that the child has to believe that the method or the ritual will keep him safe, and the parent usually has to be willing to go along with the premise. This whole approach may sound bizarre to rational parents who believe that buying into the ritual validates the fear and implies that the demon is real. But you can go along with this ritual without explicitly endorsing the reality status of the evil being. The fear is real -- and it's the fear that you're dealing with. You can say, "I know there are no witches, but we can check the closet anyway if it makes you feel better."
An Ounce of Prevention
The methods I've described in this chapter are those that preschool children say they prefer and that have been shown to be effective for many children. Obviously, though, it is difficult to know which one will work best for a particular child and a particular program. Some children's fright may be so intense that these first-line techniques will not be sufficient. Sometimes, for example, the child's experience is truly traumatic or the scary aspect of a particular program comes just at the time a child is dealing with a related, troubling real-life issue. If your child's reaction does not abate over time and truly interferes with his or her day-to-day activities, don't be afraid to contact your family physician or a counselor, who can help your child deal with the problem in more depth.
Remember, too, that some of these fears will take a while to subside, but most will become manageable over time. It's good also to remember that many children hide their fright from their parents because they want to appear more grown-up or they're afraid they might suffer future restrictions. What is important is your warm and caring response. What I've noticed in the retrospective reports is that the children who have suffered the most or who have suffered the longest are those who didn't confide in their parents or whose parents derided their fears or didn't take them seriously.
Finally, it is very clear that efforts at prevention are well worth the hassle when weighed against the difficulty of reassuring a young child who has been frightened by something on TV or in a movie. As I've said throughout this book, many of these responses are remarkably intense, and they can be very hard to undo. If you happen to be there when your young child is viewing something potentially frightening, you can watch for signs of fear. Believe it or not, a child won't always say, "Mommy, I'm scared!" -- but you may get a grateful nod if you ask whether you should turn the TV off now. If you're certain a show is frightening, trust your judgment and turn it off. Even if the child does not appear scared or admit to being frightened at the time, things might look different in the middle of the night.