We got paid today and on payday, we always go out to eat. Tonight we went to a popular restaurant in Toledo that is supposedly haunted. My daughter didn’t want to go fearing a ghostly encounter, but once we got there and she realized it was just a normal busy restaurant with nothing wrong with it, she was fine.
I used to fear supposedly haunted places, too, and I’ll admit it, I’m still a little afraid of the dark.
But why do kids fear monsters under the bed or in the closet? Why do they have fears that adults know aren’t true?
When I was little I was afraid of tractors and semi-trucks because I thought they had mean faces– especially the green Oliver in my grandpa’s barn. I about shit my pants every time he started the thing.
Also, growing up out in the middle of nowhere I was certain I was going to get abducted by aliens. I was sure one night I would see their big eyes peering through my bedroom window. It never happened, but it was certainly a big fear of mine– enough to keep me up at night.
I also assumed every storm would produce a tornado and my big sister thought it was hilarious to sing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” from The Wizard of Oz every time it stormed to make me cry.
I’m still afraid of tornados but as an adult that just makes me ultra-prepared. I’ve got my bug-out bag ready to go when it gets bad. My husband is the type that likes to go outside and look when the siren goes off but I’m the one yelling at everyone to get their asses in the basement.
Obviously, most people grow out of their childhood fears, but what makes children have so many unfounded fears in the first place? Are there just too many unknowns at that age?
What did you fear as a child? Are there any fears you didn’t grow out of?
This probably is a too simple answer but I think for me the stuff that really scared me was connected to stuff in my life that I really should be afraid of. An example of a really scary thing that was frightening at the time but didn’t stick with me for very long was John Carpenter’s The Thing. I think I saw it when I was 10 years old and it freaked me out a bit for a couple weeks. I think I was fine after that.
On the other hand, I had an angry father who lost his cool a bit too frequently and would sometimes stomp around and break my toys when he was angry. And he looked like he was barely restraining himself from trying to do the same to me. As a child I wanted to get away from that but I was trapped. If I’d watched a film featuring something I could connect to that in my mind I’d probably still be freaked out about it.
This feels like an overly simple answer so I’m sure other people have different experiences that this wouldn’t account for. But that’s how it seems to have worked for me.
I remember as a child sleeping on my left side so a vampire wouldn’t be able to bite my carotid artery. Also, for awhile, not letting a hand or foot hang off the bed, lest Jaws get it (no, I didn’t live on a boat). My oldest child was very worried about lava coming up the street and burning up the house…and we don’t live anywhere near a volcano.
I recently read somewhere that children are excellent observers; they notice everything (like the face on a tractor). But they don’t know enough about life and how things work because they haven’t lived long enough and their brains are still developing. For example: you noticed tornadoes happen when there are storms, but you hadn’t seen enough storms to know that not *every* (or *most* or *many*) storms mean there will be tornadoes.
I don’t recall a lot of childhood fears, other than an irrational phobia of house centipedes. I did have one somewhat crippling fear that I developed later in childhood, around the fifth grade, because of a Twilight Zone episode.
It was the one about a guy offered a too-good-to-be-true deal of a free house and all his needs catered to, and then it turns out he’s an exhibit in an alien zoo. We had just come home and turned on the tv ahead of the late news, so I came in without any backstory where he’s touring his new home and is then left alone. Then he realizes that there’s just a brick wall behind the drapes and he can’t open the door to leave.
I don’t know why that hit me so hard, but afterward for years I was terrified to completely close the door of any small room, like a bathroom, or get in an elevator, because what if I couldn’t get it open again?
I think I finally got over it when I lived on the 23rd floor of my dorm in college. 😀
As a child I used to be scared of going into the garage alone at night. Perfectly fine in daylight but at night, even with the garage light on, I felt I was being watched by the spirits that live in the corners up by the ceiling.
As an adult pretty far along in years, I’m not afraid to swim in deep water but one thing I can’t do is float vertically with my legs extended straight down into the briny deep. I have an overwhelming feeling that some ancient sea creature is going to chomp onto my legs and pull me under. Or that a snapping turtle is going to show up and take bite out of my, …, well, enough said about that. If I can see all the way to the bottom, like in a pool or very clear lake water, then I’m fine.
As a kid and even as a young adult, my father used to beat us kids mercilessly. Compared to that, there werent many things I could fantasize to myself that would scare me.
There’s a lot to be scared of, man. It’s just gone from ghosts and ghoulies to, like, war and shit.
Children are instinctively afraid. Children are small and don’t understand the world enough to know what is really a danger and what isn’t, and rely on their caregiver(s) (typically mommy or mommy and daddy) to protect them. Very young children tend to panic if they don’t see their usual caregivers or if their caregivers aren’t visibly paying attention to them. In prehistory, that made a lot of sense — the world was full of life-threatening dangers, which a child couldn’t recognize or know how to escape from. As children get older, we train them to tolerate being out of sight of their safe haven (=caregiver), but that doesn’t make the fear go away, so it looks around for something to attach the fear to.
On top of that, if there are real-live scary things in a child’s life — like the violent parent mentioned in some of the other comments — that rational fear gets added onto the instinctive fear. And if the child can’t afford to be afraid of the real scary thing, like an abusive parent, because the person they’re afraid of is also the person that they need to feel safe with (cf. van der Kolk’s description of disordered attachment), then it gets attached to something else.
I remember when I was a child, I used to have nightmares of my house being full of vampires who I couldn’t get away from, and when I finally got out and asked for help from outsiders, they put me back in the house. Looking back on it (after years of therapy), I see it as symbolic of how I felt about being in my parents’ house: the people gave the impression of being nice and caring, but were in substance neglectful and emotionally abusive. It also explains why I felt I had to get away and find a way of not needing them – once I went to college, I pretty much left, and only came back for brief visits.
Children do not fear anything until their elders teach them fear.
Allison, that was a great explanation!
Also, I think fears might be a sign of a great imagination. Ashes is really creative even as an adult, and ti takes imagination to see faces in tractor grills, etc. Ashes daughter has her imagination and her creativity.
Also, what WMD Kitty said: as an adult in the USA, if you’re a woman, you have to be afraid that that party that took away the right to abortion if your pregnancy is literally killing them…is now coming for your contraception (e.g. birth control pills and other methods). The NC wanna-be governor doesn’t believe women should be allowed to vote. The Republican party is trying to dumb down schools…how soon until they declare that women don’t need to know how to read and write?
I think Allison nailed it: ” In prehistory, that made a lot of sense — the world was full of life-threatening dangers, which a child couldn’t recognize or know how to escape from.”.
Or, put another way, fear of basically everything is a trait that, for most of human history, was selected for. Kids who were basically afraid of everything got to grow up and pass that on. Kids who were fearless, not so much.