It’s that time of year again, Halloween. The holiday season brings fun parties, yummy candy, cool costumes, creative home decorations, and general good times with family, friends, and neighbors. If you celebrate by trick-or-treating, it’s one of the few times of the year where children are encouraged to visit their neighbors, and neighbors are encouraged to give gifts to children (albeit, with a chaperone). The tradition of interacting in a person-to-person exchange of goodwill has now become unique in the American culture, and, in my opinion, can serve as a celebration of community. I have lasting memories of being a child on Halloween and parenting my own children through Halloween. Before I really start the focus of this post, I want to emphasize my own positive feelings toward Halloween and how I believe it can be a holiday that brings joy, family, and community to the forefront for a child’s life. I look forward to the children coming by my house for candy every year and spend time making sure I have the “good” candy.

For young children, Halloween is magical in that they are allowed and encouraged to be whoever they want to be by the adults in their lives. On most days of the year, children are told to be realistic, practical, and operate in the real world. This discouragement often works against the basic developmental needs of young children to imagine themselves as anything they want to be. So, Halloween is the exception to the typical messages that children are sent about growing up which is a solid explanation for why children love Halloween so much (plus there’s candy!).

A growing concern I have about young children and Halloween is the current pervasive use of frightening images that children are exposed to in stores, in neighborhoods, and on screens. As I drive down my road to work, I see skeletons crawling into chimneys, bloody corpses, shining demon eyes on scary faces, decorated graveyards with corpses rising from the ground, and many more. All of these decorations are meant in good fun and are typically designed by adults for laughs and celebration of creativity. However, when young children see these images, we must consider their perspectives.

Your Child’s Perspective

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  At ages 2 to 6 years old, children are growing to and reaching the height of their imagination. Anything can be real at these ages.

• Young children operate in a world of images, feelings, and behaviors. They do not operate in a verbal world. They listen to our tones, actions, and visuals much more than they ever hear our words. Your tone, a picture, a scene, or an action will outlast anything you ever actually say to a young child.

• Because young children have less experience with life, everything is new to them. They have no context to know that people don’t end up bloody on their lawn or skeletons don’t come out of the ground. All of these images could be something that could happen in a young child’s mind.

• Young children can be attracted to images that scare them or that they don’t understand. This can be confusing for parents because it seems their young child is actually enjoying some of the images out there. The young child can be equally attracted to and frightened by the same image.

So, what does this all mean for Halloween? Your 2 to 6-year-old is particularly vulnerable to scary images—much more vulnerable to the images than you might think. It is typical for a young child to take in an image, briefly or never mention it, and subsequently, become focused or scared of the image. Once the image is in the mind of the child, it is almost impossible to erase it, no matter how many times the adult tries to explain it.

For example, a 3-year-old walks by a television screen which has a frightening image playing (think the television show, Stranger Things). The parent notices that the child stops for a few seconds but then returns to their play. The parent feels relieved that the child did not seem to notice and is now convinced that the child “doesn’t really pay attention” to the show (something I’ve heard parents say many times). As the 3-year-old’s imagination grows to its height at 4-years-old, suddenly the child wakes up with nightmares of scary monsters that are described by the child to match what they saw on the television show, although most of the time they have no memory of the actual show. As the child grows to be a 6-year-old, imagination is now matched with developmentally typical fears of the age, and they may become even more distressed by the images. If these images continue to grow in the young child’s mind, we will see the fears continue to grow throughout older childhood years, lending to irrational fears at ages 8-12.

You may be thinking that this concern is alarmist and scary images have always been a part of childhood. Absolutely true. I, myself, will never get the image of the flying monkeys from the original Wizard of Oz out of my head. I remember being up many nights as a child with those flying monkeys flying all around me and, to this day, I will sometimes get a quick mental image of them that produces a spark of fear. As an adult, I can reason through the reality of flying monkeys, but children’s brains are still developing, and they are going to move to the feeling/image part of the brain rather than the “thinking through” part of the brain which is still new and underdeveloped for them.

When I think of how hard parents work to protect their children, I believe this understanding of how children take in information and keep information is unknown to parents. Parents go to great lengths to protect their children from media in which there is cursing, explicit sexual content, drug content, or adult themes, yet if the media is presented in an animation with none of those elements, there seems to be less concern with images that might be displayed. Recently, I watched KPop Demon Hunters, a very popular show that by all accounts has great music, a positive message, and admirable characters. Yet, throughout the movie, there are images of demons and images of souls being sucked out into a fiery unembodied voice. Media reviews have recommended this movie for 10 years and up, yet many parents of young children are allowing their children to watch it. A 5-year-old might have memorized all the songs and can dance happily through them but I think it would be worthwhile for parents to ask, has my 5-year-old taken in the more frightening images and are they holding them in their head? What do they now believe about what happens to their soul? Do they even know what a soul is? How would I explain a soul to my 5-year-old? Are the eyes of the demons disturbing to me? Do the images come back to me? I wonder what that means for my 5-year-old?

I believe it is important to remember if a child believes that a man in a red suit travels to every home in the world in one night, jumps down their chimney through magic, and leaves them gifts, what might they believe about skeletons scaling their house to get in? One is an image of benevolence and joy while the other is an image of fear and the unknown. Young children will believe both.

What Can You Do as a Parent?

1. Think more about the images your child takes in. It’s so much easier to tell a child that a curse word that they hear isn’t for using than to try to erase an image from a child’s mind.
2. Restrict your young child’s exposure to scary images at home. If you watch shows/videos or play games that have frightening images, do so when your child is not available to watch. If you are unsure of the content of shows/videos/games, watch or play them yourself before watching them with your child.
3. For times such as Halloween, decorate with lesser scarier images such as carved pumpkins or other more neutral images. As your child grows (think 10 years old and up) and you see that they enjoy scarier images without being disturbed by them, you can expand your decorations.
4. If you walk by or drive by images that you think might be scary for your child, try not to dwell on them while also trying not to hide them. It’s a tough balance. Spending too much time stopping and explaining to your child so they won’t be scared may leave too much time for the image to be imprinted in the child’s mind. Trying to hide the image from your child quickly may send a message that they should be scared. A simple nonchalant, “that’s weird, let’s go look at some other stuff” will often be the solution.
5. If you believe that your child has taken in an image that’s scary for them, encourage them to talk with you. Something like, “Our neighbor really decorated for Halloween this year, what do you think about it?” or “That was a scary scene in that video, what did you think?” Your young child might not have much to say in response and that’s okay. It’s good for you to open the conversation so they can come back to you later if they want to talk about it.

Being a parent comes with a million challenges and there is no right way to parent. Being aware of our children’s perspectives and how they take in information as they develop over time can help us to make better decisions.