The skeletons go up in a neighbor's yard in early October, and some children walk past without a second look. Others stop cold, and their parents spend the rest of the month deciding how much of the Halloween season that child can handle. Sarah Kollat, teaching professor of developmental psychology at Penn State, shares advice with Campus Insights Media for those parents on preparing children for spooky season, deciding when a fear has become a problem and what therapy for a child actually looks like.
The work of preparing a scared child for Halloween starts well before Oct. 31. "In developmental psychology, we talk a lot about preparing our children for experiences that might be more difficult, and spooky season can be difficult for some kids because you're seeing skeletons in people's yards and you're seeing big spider webs and you're going trick or treating at night when it's dark out," Kollat said.
Walk through it before it happens
The technique Kollat recommends is called a social story, and it can be as simple as a caregiver and a child sitting down to talk about what the next few weeks are going to look like. Younger children do better with something to look at. Libraries carry picture books for this; more are available online, and a parent can draw one for a particular child.
What the story tells the child is straightforward. It is October, you are going to see scary things in people's yards, and all of it is pretend. The second half matters as much as the first, because it covers what to do when the fear actually arrives. Kollat points to two responses that work at any age: Take a deep breath or find a grown-up and say out loud that you are scared.
What a child can do depends on how old they are
A great deal changes in how children manage their own emotions between toddlerhood and adolescence, Kollat said, and the Halloween version of that looks like this:
- Younger children lean on other people to calm down. Finding a trusted adult is the skill to teach them.
- By elementary school, children self-regulate better. Some talk themselves through it out loud, in Kollat's example saying, "I'm feeling scared right now, but I don't need to be scared."
- By adolescence, that self-talk has moved inside and turned logical. A teenager can reason their way to the fact that what they are looking at is a costume.
Nemours KidsHealth puts the dividing line at about seven, the age by which most children reliably tell real from pretend.
Know which child you have
Some children want the adrenaline that fear brings, and Kollat said the pattern shows from age two or three through the teenage years. For a child who seeks out that stimulation, the scary hayride may be exactly right.
Another child takes little pleasure in new experiences of any kind and prefers a quieter social life. For that child, Kollat said, a haunted house is probably not the best idea, while a trunk-or-treat, the daytime version where children collect candy from decorated car trunks in a parking lot, is "probably a perfect idea, because they're getting to participate in this ritual of Halloween, but they don't have to do it at a time when it's dark, when it's scary, they can't see as well."
Give them a say, and a way out
Kollat said the holiday does not have to be the stereotype of everyone dressed up at night running around with flashlights. Letting a child make some of the decisions is an option even for the very young.
Choice is one half of it. The other is a plan for the night itself. Agree in advance on a signal, or on words the child can use: it is time to go home, or “I need a break” and I want to sit down and look at all my amazing candy. That gives a child a way to say they are overwhelmed before it turns into a scene, and it tells them, as Kollat put it, that you are there to support them.
For costumes and makeup, she suggests watching tutorials together. A video that starts on an ordinary face and ends on a zombie shows a child that there is a real person under the makeup, and for many children, that is enough on its own.
When the scare follows them home
Sometimes a child is frightened enough that it follows them to bed. Kollat said children who have had a nightmare frequently want to tell you what they saw, and letting them talk it out, or draw it, is the first move.
One bad night is a brain working through what it took in during the day. Several nights of bad dreams are a different matter, and at that point, she said, it is time to start working on the fear directly.
Pediatric guidance puts a clock on it. Children's Hospital Colorado calls occasional bad dreams normal at any age after about six months, and tells parents to call their child's physician if the nightmares worsen, if they have not largely settled after two weeks, or if the fear starts interfering with daytime activities.
Kollat's own approach, which she said works for adults as well as children, is to put the scary thought somewhere else. She described a friend who is a counselor and brings a small locked box to sessions with young clients. They name the fears, write them down, talk about how unlikely they are to come true, then lock the paper away.
The mistake that comes from good intentions
The most common mistake Kollat sees at Halloween comes from parents acting out of love. The instinct is to put a frightened child in front of everything at once so they can see for themselves that there is nothing to be afraid of.
That approach has a name. "In the field, we call it flooding," she said, describing it as a way of treating a phobia that you often do not want to use on a child. The result is the opposite of what the parent intended: "That's going to overwhelm them. It's going to make their fear even worse." For a child who already runs fearful or anxious, she said, a big haunted house or a horror movie is not a safe way to get over it.
The alternative is small and slow. Sit on the porch after dark if the dark is the problem. Draw a ghost that comes out more funny than frightening. Kollat described the ladder used for phobias generally, with spiders as her example: Picture a spider and practice staying calm, then draw one, then hold a toy one, and only then, sit in a room with a real one. By that point, the child has practiced staying calm at every step, which is what makes the last one manageable.
Where ordinary fear ends
Fear itself is not the enemy here. "Fear in general is an important evolutionary emotion. We need it to survive. We need to know when there is danger present," she said. Anxiety can work the same way. Going into a big competition, a little of it is useful and energizing.
The line she draws is about function rather than intensity. The emotions turn into a problem, she said, "when these kind of powerful emotions are interrupting our ability to do our day to day life." In a child, that shows up in the basics: eating, sleeping, getting to school, enjoying the day. She described a household version too, where separation worry grows severe enough that the parents cannot leave the house. "The phrase we often use in our field is it's disrupting the quality of life," she said. "Otherwise, these are natural things that everybody's going to experience."
Calling a counselor is not an escalation
Kollat frames professional help as ordinary care rather than a last resort. "If you're not resisting going to your pediatrician when you have questions or going to the dentist when you have a dental issue, going to see a professional counselor should be approached the same way," she said. It treats an issue, and "it's not indicative that there's any sort of cataclysmic problem. You know, it's just a normal piece of health care."
The trigger she gives parents is their own stalled effort. If a parent is working on a child's fears and finding it is not helping, if the child is still uncomfortable and unable to enjoy their day or the experiences the parent wants for them, that is the point to seek out professional help. The help runs both directions, she said, training the parents to support the child and teaching the child skills suited to their age.
The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry suggests parents start with people they already trust, including a child's pediatrician or school counselor, and points to local medical and psychiatric societies, county mental health departments and hospitals with psychiatric services for referrals.
What the first appointment actually looks like
Kollat had a warning about the search itself. "Finding a counselor to work with is a lot like dating, in the sense that you're not going to click with everybody," she said. Therapy is built on a relationship, and without a compatible one, "it doesn't mean they're a bad therapist. It means you two are a bad fit." It can take a couple of tries to find someone who clicks with both the parent and the child, and she told parents not to be discouraged when the first one does not.
The first session itself is unglamorous: intake paperwork, questionnaires about a child's behaviors, symptoms and strengths, and questions about developmental history. "It's going to be kind of tedious at first." After that, with children, the work rarely looks like talking. Much of the early time goes to building rapport through games and drawing, "things that look like they're not productive, but they really, really are."
The point of all of it, Kollat said, is that children want to enjoy Halloween, and a plan makes that possible for the ones who would otherwise be too scared to have any fun at all.
This story was produced by Campus Insights Media on behalf of Pennsylvania State University and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.