Parenting Today
With the arrival of spooky season comes new shows, movies, and online content designed to scare and delight audiences. But what happens when your child is one of the unintended viewers?
Here’s everything you need to know about helping your children navigate uncomfortable images and ideas during this time of year, and how you can help prevent access in the future.
Focus on Connection, Not Correction
When children come across scary content, they feel a lot of things at once: curiosity, embarrassment, shame, confusion, and fear might all be present. Talking to them about the content and helping them through the emotions begins with reinforcing your own positive connection.
Be Proactive and Check in Consistently
One of the best ways to keep lines of communication open is to check in consistently. They should expect your routine involvement. Ask your kids to talk about what they’re watching and how it makes them feel. Sit down and watch a clip of their favorite video together.
By showing you care about their interests, they’re more likely to come to you with concerns or questions in the future. Remind them that you’re a team, and they should come to you if they see content that’s uncomfortable or confusing.
Be Curious
As parents, our first reaction to hearing our child has seen something inappropriate might be worry or anger, but it’s important to lead from a place of curiosity instead.
Your child is opening a line of communication, and the best way to keep that open is to let them talk safely and freely about their experience. Our own concerns are secondary to their need for a trusted connection. For many children, simply talking about what they saw is enough to dispel any lingering discomfort.
Curiosity looks like asking questions in a non-judgmental way:
- It sounds like you saw something that made you feel uncomfortable. Can you tell me more?
- I can see that you’re feeling afraid/confused/sad. Where do you feel that emotion in your body?
- What about the images/sounds made you scared? Can you tell me more about that?
- Are you worried about seeing these things again?
- Do you feel the way you expected to?
Offer Honest Feedback and Strong Boundaries
Having a confident leader in the face of upsetting situations is what your child needs most. Discuss your family’s rules about the content honestly and set firm boundaries around future involvement.
Explain if you’re changing screentime rules or limiting certain content this time of year. The phrase “every family does things differently, and this is the rule that supports our family values” can go a long way here.
Tap Into Their Logical Brains
One of the reasons spooky and scary content can affect children so profoundly is that they tend to lead with emotions. Piecing together logical reasoning for the scary content and their own reactions is a skill that parents need to model — and kids need to practice.
Watch Behind-the-Scenes Content
If your child is struggling with scary content or ideas, lift the veil on the computer magic that makes the spooky images they’ve seen.
During a calm time, show them a documentary clip of a character getting into zombie makeup or an actor practicing a werewolf gallop. Let them watch how a computer programmer codes animation for creepy ghosts and shadows. Discuss what’s really going on when they see scary images online or on television.
Reinforce Your Child’s Power
When children see scary content, their emotional brains can take over and run with an idea far beyond its original scope. This process often happens in the background, hidden until the bedtime shadows bring it to light.
Remind your child that they have the power to direct those images. The character from a spooky movie preview only exists in their mind, and they have control over those thoughts! Practice creating a script together for the creepy images and direct them to do something silly, disappear, or even sit quietly watching a funny movie.
Manage Content Ahead of Time
It’s impossible to avoid all access to scary or inappropriate content, but there are several ways that parents can limit potential problems.
Device and App Controls
Make sure that parental controls on all devices and apps are up to date (Apple and Android guides, along with top parental control apps). Set content limits for a younger age range during spooky season to limit potentially upsetting content (you can always manually override the setting on a case-by-case basis).
Check Reviews and Guidelines
Many sites, like Common Sense Media, give parents a good overview of content in shows, movies, and books. Check for particular themes or images that might impact your child more than others.
With open communication and support, you and your children can all enjoy the spooky season without fear.
