Dr. Sarah (00:02):

Ever wonder what psychologists moms talk about when we get together, whether we’re consulting one another about a challenging case or one of our own kids, or just leaning on each other when parenting feels hard, because trust me, even when we do this for a living, it’s still hard. Joining me each week in these special Thursday shows are two of my closest friends, both moms, both psychologists, they’re the people I call when I need a sounding board. These are our unfiltered answers to your parenting questions. We’re letting you in on the conversations the three of us usually have behind closed doors. This is Securely Attached: Beyond the Sessions.

(00:44):

Hello. Welcome back to the Securely Attached podcast. We are going to have a Q&A session and we have Dr. Emily Upshur here and she’s going to help us answer a spooky question. Happy Halloween.

Dr. Emily (00:58):

My favorite kind.

Dr. Sarah (00:58):

Okay, so this parent writes in my 4-year-old keeps telling me that she’s scared of monsters and ghosts. I am sure in response to seeing all the Halloween decorations going up with spooky stuff everywhere, I’m worried that trick or treating might be too overwhelming for her. How can I help her feel safe by helping her start to understand what’s real and what’s just pretend.

Dr. Emily (01:23):

Good question.

Dr. Sarah (01:25):

I feel like this mom has been listening to this podcast.

Dr. Emily (01:29):

She sounds very, she’s doing all the steps Prophylactically.

Dr. Sarah (01:33):

Yes.

Dr. Emily (01:33):

The best way possible. I love it.

Dr. Sarah (01:35):

I love how she says understanding what’s real and what’s just pretend. Because I think that really kind of shows me that this parent is trying to peek under the hood and it’s not just like, oh, they’re scared, so is something wrong. What should I be doing to make them not scared? It’s like, oh, what is making her scared? Perhaps it’s this sort of, and she’s kind of on point here that there’s a developmental challenge at some of these earlier years of distinguishing what’s real and what’s not real, and that is probably what could be part of what makes Halloween scary for kids. So off the bat I’m like, congrats, you are doing half of the hardest part, which is understanding what’s developmentally going on for your kid and what’s happening beneath the wanting to avoid or asking lots of questions about the scary monsters. So there we go. That’s already one, two very important.

Dr. Emily (02:39):

Yeah, no, I love that. I think if you think about it, I do think dressing up in any way really is a cognitive ability to know that there’s somebody real and safe and different underneath the costume is really a hard thing to hold to those two things that object permanent, that sort of relativity all at the same time. So that I think is a really important thing that we can avoid, but we can start to provide context for kids. I also love when we give examples. At this age, I would put on a mask and take it off and show my kids put on a mask and take it off and just be like, tell me, oh, you forgot. Oh, there’s me again. I think actually the real life experience of doing that can be really helpful when appropriately during your developmental cognitive capacity. Can’t really wrap your head around it.

Dr. Sarah (03:42):

I mean, explaining it is still in the abstract realm.

Dr. Emily (03:46):

Yes.

Dr. Sarah (03:46):

Showing it is in the felt concrete. I can touch this, I can see this, I know I can feel this. I know it is happening. And that’s also going to be much easier for a child to recall conjure up when they are doing something where this thing shows up again like say trick or treating and you see a bunch of people in scary masks and it’s a lot easier for them to go back to the game we were playing with the mask in the house versus it’s harder for a kid to then recall a conversation that you had with them.

Dr. Emily (04:25):

Yeah, no, I think that’s really helpful. And then on the other side of me is like, okay, well these fears and worries are everywhere, and so I get that there’s more sort of priming with these decorations and those types of things. So I think I would first be curious with my kid, Hey, what does that make you think about or what does that make you feel just to get, because it could be about the decorations, it could be about a movie they saw three weeks ago. Kids can conjure up these fear in different things and we try to fill in the gaps, but we’re not always right. So there’s that. But I actually think I would say to this parent, helping your child build tolerance to these worries, these decorations are helping you, you get more opportunity to challenge that and to provide the kind of, it sounds like this mom is already doing such, or this parent is already doing such a good job at trying to discern, pretend and real, and that is a really appropriate way to talk to your kids when they’re maybe having some sort of provocative reaction or appropriate reaction to all these scary things that are going up in these decorations or at these in schools even. Those are things that happen all the time.

Dr. Sarah (05:53):

I mean, there is this one, I hear you. And I think sometimes we don’t want to read too much into it or assign too much meaning without knowing. So it is worth also just kind of thinking is this specifically because they’re seeing these decorations and they’re having a reaction? And I think that is pretty typical and normal around Halloween for younger kids. They just have to contend with stuff that they are not used to seeing and it’s in their face a lot.

(06:26):

Some of it is beyond not developmentally appropriate. Some people go real all out for Halloween and put some scary crap out there. There’s this one, our friend’s neighborhood has a Halloween parade a week before Halloween, the weekend before whenever it falls, and they always invite us and we go around. It’s so fun. It’s so cute. And it’s like little kids doing this loop around this and it’s so adorable and it’s broad daylight. It’s not nighttime, but there’s this one house on the corner that you have to pass to get to this cul-de-sac and this family wolves Halloween and is very adult in their love for Halloween and they have, it’s really cool what they do, but it is objectively terrifying trauma. Last year wrote and it’s different every year. It’s kind of exciting. People go to see this house, it’s kind of cool, but it is horror story in real life. They had these dolls hanging in nooses from the trees with blood hanging. I was like, this is horrifying me as an adult. So it’s, I think that’s pretty unusual, but there is some legit scary stuff that people put out. So I just like…

Dr. Emily (07:46):

Well, I guess though to me it’s also Halloween. It is become, I don’t know, to intentionally be scary. So your child is having an appropriate reaction to what the intention that house is intending to be spooky, period.

Dr. Sarah (08:05):

Not spooky, give you nightmares. Horrifying. I can’t unsee what I have seen kind of stuff.

Dr. Emily (08:13):

Sounds lovely. I can’t wait.

Dr. Sarah (08:14):

Yeah.

Dr. Emily (08:16):

But I think that’s right. I think you said two things that were really important to me. One was it’s intentionally scary. And the second though was this is one of those things, and I know this parent is talking about Halloween specifically because I think this is one of those things where there’s adult interest involvement as well as children. So to your point, there are other holidays that parents get into, but they keep it. I am just thinking Christmas, right? Santa’s not scary. Well, I do think it’s a little bit scary that Santa comes into your out personally, but you know, whatever.

Dr. Sarah (08:53):

Yes. I think some kids feel very anxious about that. I think we’ve even done an episode about that one.

Dr. Emily (08:57):

I believe that. But I guess my point is there’s not an cultural investment in making that a scary thing by adults and children. So I think Halloween is, I basically think your child isn’t having an inappropriate reaction to what’s going on out there. So I think you can validate these are kind of creepy, these are kind of scary. And then differentiate, pretend and real because I do think the validation piece is really important because it’s intentional from adults in the cultural zeist of our world to make it spooky. We don’t want to be like, it’s not scary because that’s not real, that’s not accurate. And we want to validate the reality.

Dr. Sarah (09:42):

And I think to that same thread, we know it’s very unlikely that you are going to do an entire round of trick or treating. Even with a 4-year-old who’s probably not going to go very far, it is very unlikely that you will not see something that spooks your kid out. And so to be able to help them prepare for that in advance, yes, you can do some of this priming of helping them comprehend how to help themselves feel better or safer or make sense of things like, this is real, this is not real. Masks are, there’s always a person under the mask. Do you see all that stuff? That’s just teaching them schemas so they can make sense of what they’re seeing. But I also think another thing we can do with our kids is help prepare them and help them cope in advance and have a plan before we go out.

(10:30):

So like, Hey, we’re going to go trick or treating. Remember that’s where we go from house to house and you get to ring the doorbell and you get a little bit of candy and it’s really fun. You get to see everyone’s costumes and it’s dark outside or it’s getting dark outside. There’s a lot of people, so that can also be something that can heighten kids’ anxiety or stress levels that can feel like there’s a lot going on. It can be really loud and chaotic. We might pass some decorations that are not real but could look kind of spooky or scary. If you see something that’s scary, what’s something we can do? If you feel scared, you can look the other way. You can say, I know this isn’t real. You can come grab my hand, we can move to the next house. I can help you. But we can give them a couple things, maybe one or two things that they can do if they do feel scared. So we’re helping them kind of cope ahead and have a plan that they can try to utilize if and when they see something that freaks them out.

Dr. Emily (11:37):

I love that cope ahead because I think they will, it’s very likely. So I’m like, let’s just to help them. That also helps build the tolerance that we’re always talking about to anxiety, right? Because if you’re prepared and you have some coping skills ahead of time, both you as the parent and the child feel more able, more sturdy in your ability to build that tolerance to cope through it and to come out the other side feeling a little less shaken.

Dr. Sarah (12:06):

And one last thought I’ll share. I think this parent was saying, I’m scared that trick-or-treating might be really too overwhelming for her. And on the one hand I think to what we’ve sort of been saying is can we think of this as an opportunity to practice distress tolerance? But I also think it’s important to say what are the developmental appropriate kind of levels of how much distress that they can handle being stretched in? And so for a kid that’s four or younger, I might be really kind of thoughtful of, okay, what level is going to be the threshold that what’s the max amount I can do before it is legitimately overwhelming and the expectation’s not appropriate. So if I know that my neighborhood kind of goes a little all out on Halloween, maybe I want to go to my friend’s neighborhood that is pretty chill or so we’re still doing it but we’re doing it at a different level or maybe we’re going to do a daytime event.

(13:10):

There’s a lot of places that put on very kid-friendly, slightly more contained Halloween trick-or-treating opportunities. A lot of malls will do events where you can go from store to store to get your candy or I don’t know, in some neighborhoods like this, my friend’s neighborhood that unfortunately is right by this horrifying nightmare of a house has this daytime parade that they do and they can trick or treat in the daytime and that’s great for little kids who are going to go to bed early and the mom and dad don’t want them to stay up and do the late night trick or treating. Other things you can do are go trick or treating early the first be the first trick or treaters, so there’s fewer kids out, it’s still light out. You get the buzz candy and we’re like, if we see spooky stuff and it’s sunny out or daylight, it’s just a little bit less spooky.

(14:00):

You can titrate it based on your kids’ age capacity, threshold tolerance and work your way up. I mean, you’re likely to have many, many, many Halloweens to practice this and it doesn’t have to all be at four. We could build our capacity to tolerate spooky stuff at Halloween over time as they get older and some kids can really, if you help ’em kind of make sense of it, they could totally do more than we think they can and can give it a go. So your kid look at their zone of tolerance and sort of stretch them from that.

Dr. Emily (14:43):

Yeah, I think that that’s a really great point because one of the things that if you can, I know this is in some ways I am so lucky to have this in my community, but I will sometimes go to the houses, the people I know, and when my kids were little and I’d be like, Hey, this is Mrs. So-and-So, or this is Mr. So-and-So can you take off your thing. Just be really sort, have a very approachable, manageable experience that gives a little bit more, gives that opportunity to have that pretend versus real in managing and creating just a much more regulated experience for them. And that’s a really nice opportunity, whether that’s at your school, Halloween party or trick or treating or whatever it is. If you can sort of curate that a little bit ahead of time, that can be really nice too. Hey, I’m coming over to your house. I know you usually dress up like a spooky witch when you give out candy at your door, can you also say hi? And to my child who is a little scared of witches right now, that can be really helpful.

Dr. Sarah (15:58):

And be take off the hat and be like, it’s me. See, I am in a costume.

Dr. Emily (16:03):

Exactly.

Dr. Sarah (16:04):

Still me is always going to be me.

Dr. Emily (16:05):

Exactly. This is Sarah’s mom, look. Can you believe it? She dressed up like this. That really helps.

Dr. Sarah (16:11):

Yeah. Well, I hope everyone has a very happy Halloween and you do what works for your kids and stretch them. Don’t stretch them. It’s a holiday. Have fun. Do what works. Eat some candy. Get yourself some candy.

Dr. Emily (16:30):

I know the adult version of Halloween is also nice to have an equal candy experience.

Dr. Sarah (16:38):

Oh yeah. Oh, I eat so much of my kids candy. I will just replace it later. Go to Costco.

Dr. Emily (16:47):

I do actually do that a lot. I’m not going to lie.

Dr. Sarah (16:50):

Yeah, I’m lucky. I do not know how this happened. Maybe my kids have very short-term memory loss, but for some reason my kids will, I mean, my kids are super sugar oriented. It’s not like they don’t care about sugar, but for some reason after Halloween they get all these huge buckets of candy. They’re super excited and I put them away in the top of the closet and they just kind of forget that they are there.

Dr. Emily (17:22):

I can’t even. That is not.

Dr. Sarah (17:24):

I don’t know. I don’t think this is going to last that much longer. They know they have candy, but it’s out of sight, out of mind for them. Maybe because we always have candy. They don’t hurt for sugar, so they maybe are just like, I’ll get it later.

Dr. Emily (17:39):

Meanwhile, my kids are like, I had 485 pieces of candy and now they’re only 484. Who ate my candy?

Dr. Sarah (17:50):

My kids give me that kind of grief in other places. For some reason, Halloween candy just happened. Literally, I still, it is…

Dr. Emily (17:56):

A gift.

Dr. Sarah (17:56):

A year later, I have the Halloween candy bucket from last year with candy still in it like getting stale in the top of my closet in the hallway. I swear.

Dr. Emily (18:05):

This is your parenting gift. You’re welcome.

Dr. Sarah (18:07):

Thank you. I appreciate it. I’ll take it. Happy Halloween.

Dr. Emily (18:10):

Happy Halloween.

Dr. Sarah (18:12):Thank you so much for listening. As you can hear, parenting is not one size fits all. It’s nuanced and it’s complicated. So I really hope that this series where we’re answering your questions really helps you to cut through some of the noise and find out what works best for you and your unique child. If you have a burning parenting question, something you’re struggling to navigate or a topic you really want us to shed light on or share research about, we want to know, go to drsarahbren.com/question to send in anything that you want, Rebecca, Emily, and me to answer in Securely Attached: Beyond the Sessions. That’s drsarahbren.com/question. And check back for a brand new securely attached next Tuesday. And until then, don’t be a stranger.