1. Reflecting on my own childhood…I don’t know. I was always told ghosts weren’t real, but it didn’t stop five year old me from imagining them and thus getting too creeped out to go into dark rooms alone. I didn’t believe ghosts were real, though I still believed spiritual entities like demons existed (I assumed they weren’t actually chilling out in my room). Buuuut, at that age it kind of didn’t matter what I believed because I would always get creeped out IMAGINING something was there, even if I rationally knew there wasn’t. Some of that fear is human instinct that children have once they learn there are malevolent things in this world. That’s actually kind of good. Imagine a tribal society that shares territory with predatory animals. If children weren’t afraid of the dark or that things could hurt them, they would wander away from the adults or the firelight and get eaten. Fear is an important instinct, so long as we don’t take it to extremes.

    As we get older, we just have to strike a balance between being cautious and careless. So in addition to the ‘God is bigger’ thing, maybe it’s important for parents to discuss the fact that fear is something to pay attention to since it keeps us safe, but that we shouldn’t go overboard with it.

    One thing that could help would be to make her logically/rationally question what she thinks about ghosts and all that, that way, whether or not she’s still fearful, she still gets a lesson on how to ask the right questions in life. ‘Why do you think there would be ghosts in your room? What makes you think the ghosts would hurt you?’ etc, etc. If she says ‘because that’s what’s on tv’, then you could ask why she believes the tv, or let her know that a lot of the ghosts stories on tv are made up for entertainment(even on documentaries), and that even if ghosts are real, that doesn’t mean people on tv know what they’re actually like. In either case, such questions provide insight into how a child thinks, so asking doesn’t hurt since it can provide useful into in the long run.

What do you think?