Kid Fears

GUEST POSTER, NICOLE WRIGHT

I’m a parent. And having children is truly one of the most fun and fascinating things I’ve ever done with my own DNA, because my kids are both hilarious and quirky. They keep me constantly laughing and wondering where the hell they come up with the things they do and say.

An example: my 7 year-old son is irrationally afraid of skunks. Not that it’s a bad to fear skunks (tomato juice baths do not sound pleasant), but it’s to the degree that he doesn’t even really like watching old episodes of Pepe Le Pew. Which is a shame because sexual assault never looked so adorable. 

But I digress… The point I’m getting to is: kids are afraid of weird stuff. And what influences those nightmare-causing fears and phobias are not necessarily the horrific events that are really happening in the world around them. In fact, the things that I remember being most traumatized by as a kid were not the Jamestown Massacre or Adam Walsh’s murder. Instead it was the super fantastical and very unlikely happenings featured in the Friday night made-for-TV movies we all watched with the babysitter while our parents were out every weekend discoing the late 70s and early 80s away. Gems like these:

Ants! (1977)

If the section from 2:50 through 5:40 doesn’t make your skin crawl, you have no soul. And if it can happen to Chrissie Snow, it can happen to anyone.

A very special episode of Columbo where a bad man staged his wife’s death by dropping a hair dryer in her bathtub forever changed the way I look at this label:

It seriously took a dozen years for me to comfortably dry my hair anywhere near a water source.

The moral of this story is, while I often worry about my son seeing a story about Caylee Anthony or footage from 9/11 on the evening news, I should probably be most concerned about him stumbling across a repeat of Towering Inferno on cable. Or I guess in his particular case, Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom reruns.