Why Your Child is Afraid: Nightmares, Darkness and Ghosts

Your child has just begun to sleep through the night (without bed-wetting) and you’re looking forward to doing the same after years of disturbed-sleep nights. A ear-piercing scream shatters your illusions. Your child has had a nightmare, and you are back in the nightmarish world of waking up again and again in the middle of the night to soothe your child.

Apparently, of all human beings, children in the age group 5 – 9 are the ones most prone to nightmares. Also, the incidence of nightmares amongst children in this age group is very high – often more than once a week.

Nightmares leave a child feeling insecure, scared, and sometimes paralyzed with fear. As your child begins to understand fear, he begins to fear even the feeling of fear.

Franklin D. Roosevelt put it well when he said in his first inaugural address in 1933: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself – nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes…”

Where does this fear come from? I believe it comes from two sources.

The first is that your child begins to realize in a practical way that you (the parent) are a separate person from him.  Not only are you a separate body, but you have a separate heart and a separate mind. He realizes that you think, feel, and respond differently to people and situations than he does. He wonders if he has sufficient ‘hold’ on you; he wonders whether some day the differences may not become so great that you separate from each other.

Till today, your presence meant food, security, shelter, love; his whole life is wrapped up in you. Since he has associated so closely and deeply with you, he finds it hard to believe that he can live separately from you. So he begins to fear separation from you. This is one kind (and source) of fear.

The other is the fear that you put into your child. We know this one! As we try to civilize our child, prepare him for socialization, teach him the ‘rules’ of polite society, we use fear as a tool. In some cases, it may be as obvious as: “If you don’t eat your food and get into bed quickly, the Scary Monster will come and get you!” We may think this is a bit of a joke. Our child doesn’t. He is too young to understand the difference between reality and fantasy. Every experience is new and fantastic to him (fantastic in the sense of fantasy-like). We are jaded and blasé about showers and dogs on the street and blowing bubbles and clouds and raindrops and shiny toys and sticky mud; he is not. It is all new, all exciting, and all fantasy to him.

So our joke of a Scary Monster is a real-life Scary Monster to him. The Monster may be so scary that we don’t even want to describe him! This creates yet another problem. If we say the Scary Monster has green teeth, then any person or animal or creature that does not have green teeth is automatically not the Scary Monster. But if there is no clarity on what makes the Scary Monster scary, then anyone and anything could be the Scary Monster!

Sometimes we also induce fear in our children using subtle means. As he grows, we want to control and channel his excitement into the ‘right’ paths. We don’t really want him looking at cloud shapes for hours every day – unless it helps his artistic skills. We don’t want her poking around in messy mud – unless she’s showing signs of becoming a sculptor.

So we manipulate our child’s behavior. We say, “If you keep looking at the clouds, you will ‘waste’ so much time! Instead, you could be doing ‘fun’ things, like playing in the park, solving a jigsaw, reading a book.” If he listens, well and good. If not, we begin to withdraw from him. We frown. We clearly express our displeasure, we deny him our approval. More separation, more fear.

You may disagree with me. You may say, “At times, you have to teach a child to feel some fear.” I understand what you’re saying.

At first, when they are very young, children are not afraid of anything. A child will happily climb onto the balcony railing and jump off the fourth story because she simply doesn’t know enough to be afraid of how many bones she will break when she falls. In order to keep her safe, you feel we have to teach her the feeling of fear.

How can we stop him running across a busy road? We need to tell him that if he does that, some vehicle may hit him. He will hurt himself. It will be painful. You can’t say that running across the road might kill him because he won’t understand the concept of death.

So we start teaching him fear.

As your child gets on with the business of living and growing, as he meets other people (children and parents), watches, listens, reads, plays, thinks, imagines and understands, he begins to knit together different thoughts and sensations. The worst ones come together as fears, and they are expressed in nightmares.

So your child is screaming with fear, and you’ve rushed to attend to him. You hold him, pat him or caress him, and say, “It’s nothing. Don’t worry. Everything is fine. You’re safe. There are no monsters, there’s nothing to be afraid of – it’s only darkness.”

This is a meaningless string of words, but you will always say this – without fail. 🙂 (I know, because this was my first reaction for so many years!)

I ask you: if you are unwell and you feel you have all the symptoms of some dreaded disease and you’re sharing your fears with me and I say to you, “Don’t worry. Everything’s fine. You’ll be okay.”

Would you believe me?

I doubt it.

I don’t think you would even listen to my words because my response itself would be proof that I was not listening when you were sharing your fears.

Your child’s fears are real. As far as she is concerned, the darkness is a real thing that she is actively scared of, the way you would be afraid if a growling bear were charging at you. She’s telling you she’s frightened of darkness, and you say there is nothing to be scared of!

When your child is scared, you need to indulge her.

Here’s a possible scenario between a child and a parent:

Child: I’m scared!

Parent: What scared you?

Child: The dark! I woke up and couldn’t see anything!

Parent (instead of saying “There’s nothing to be afraid of in the darkness”): You were scared because you couldn’t see?

Child: Because it was dark.

Parent: But at night, before you went to bed, it was dark outside! You weren’t scared then.

Child: I wasn’t scared because I could see things – even if it was dark outside.

Parent: When we play peek-a-boo, or hide-and-seek, or blind-man’s-buff, you need to close your eyes for a while. Do you feel scared then? After all, you can’t see anything if your eyes are closed.

Your child will respond. Carry the conversation forward – step by step. Don’t force your point of view. Listen and respond to what your child is saying. As you engage your child in conversation, you will show him a logical way of looking at things. This will not remove the fear, but it will move the focus of the conversation away from the fear. Your child will begin to calm down.

As you keep talking calmly to your child, the sound of your voice will further soothe him. If you have switched the light on, the removal of darkness will dispel the ghosts or monsters or other things he fears. Keep holding him. If he doesn’t want to leave you, either get into his bed or take him into bed with you.

Don’t worry that you’re encouraging indiscipline. Unless he’s at peace, he won’t go back to sleep, and you won’t be able to go back to sleep either. In which case, it hardly matters whether you both are awake in his bed or in yours.

Read him a feel-good bedtime story. Let him drift back to sleep. Now decide whether to put him back in his bed or stay with him.

In the next post, I’ll share tips on what you can do over the long term to help your child get over these fears.