Childhood Fear and Horror as Psychological Development

For a while, my husband and I opened our home to foster children for something called respite care. It’s basically multi-day to weeklong babysitting for foster kids when the primary foster parents have to attend to something else. Out of state trips. Long weekends. The kind of thing where you might drop a non-foster kid of with grandma for a little vacation, but foster kids need specialty training and home-standards. Thus special babysitter.
Which also means we’ve received trauma-based childcare training to be certified as a home. Put that on top of my experience in private childcare and helping raise infant family members, I personally, have a not insignificant amount of experience taking care of kids with a healthy combination of personal experience and evidenced-based theory.
This factoid is important for later.
So we had a trio of kids in one week. Great kids. Super smart. Creative. Curious. Wonderful imagination play. We were kitty cat pop stars for large parts of the week. Send them home. No issues.
Until two days later when I start getting the weirdest text messages from our caseworker about a specific piece of horror media that’s geared toward preteens. I actually happened to know about the franchise from a broader perspective (more than anyone else in this situation, I would find), but was like why are you asking? This was a portent of a much bigger problem (some of which deserves its own story.)
As I’m finally unwinding everything, turns out the primary foster parents were of the impression we had allowed the kids to watch a scary video. This absolutely did not happen. It took me the whole week leading up to the official meeting about this “incident” to even figure out where they got this idea. Short answer is, basically, kids say the damnedest things
They were excitable about the fact that a couple of characters from this aforementioned kid’s horror IP happened to appear in some family channel videos about dollmaking and puzzles. Keeping in mind, I didn’t even immediately clock these characters. The kids did, though. The kids already knew about these characters and where they were from. They had been exposed to the franchise through some other means before they had ever entered my home. And based on how this blew up, it certainly wasn’t through the primary foster parents, either.
The level of freak out everyone had around what ended up being, ostensibly, a miscommunication, you would think I forced these kids to sit for double feature of Cannibal Holocaust and A Serbian Film. And as things unfolded, they couldn’t tell me I had actually done anything wrong. Because I hadn’t. I hadn’t allowed the children to watch anything age inappropriate or scary. And I posited to my caseworker if this is going to be this big of a deal, how am I expected to keep this from happening again?
We watched The Little Mermaid that week. Do you know how dark some of the Ursula scenes are? How genuinely frightening Te Kā from Moana is, and how that little bit of scary is kind of the point to that character design? What if I let a kid watch Monster’s Inc and a primary foster parent was upset because they believed monsters, conceptually, were just too scary? What if the kid sees something that scares them that none of us anticipated because kids are scared of weird shit? If the mere possibility of a foster child experiencing a slight amount of fictional stress is this much of a big deal, why is the foster system not implementing codified standards and practices that clarify this issue? Why is it not part of the training? Do you trust me or do you not? Do you trust the training you gave me or no?
And it was just a capstone of something I’ve personally seen happen multiple times working in childcare and something we all notice when talking about Halloween costumes and decorations. We are terrified of children experiencing fear and adjacent emotions.
This is in contradiction to all the evidence that kids benefit from having a controlled environment to experience these emotions. Age-appropriate horror gives kids a preview of fear so that when they experience it in real life, they’ve had practice processing it. Horror shows children, through narrative, that’s it’s possible to overcome their fears. Fighting fictional monsters helps us deal with the real-world ones.
More importantly, kids are going to be exposed to stuff that you have no control over. They’re going to come home talking about stuff that you’ve never heard of. So are you going to give them the tools to handle stuff when you’re not there?
This fear of fear puts parents into this black and white thinking of horror==bad instead of recognizing there is a vast and manageable middle ground. This binary thinking fails to acknowledge that kids are going to be scared of stuff that you don’t expect. That they process fear differently than we do as adults.
I was scared of slightly too bright full moons until well into my teens because of the exact wrong episode of Outer Limits.
So are you going to shield your kids or set them up with the ability to intellectually process the very scary world around them?