A silly attempt to protect our children has me spooked
CAN you believe it’s coming up to mid-term already? Call me an old fart but it feels to me like we’ve barely gotten into the routine of ‘back to school’ and we are hitting the halfway point of the longest term in the school calendar.
In many primary schools, Friday will be a fancy dress day. The kids will troop into class like a little band of witches, vampires and zombies — a vertically challenged, rogues’ gallery of Halloween characters. Except in some schools, where they’ve decided that potentially scary costumes are no longer acceptable as fancy dress, so witches and ghosts are now binned. My 10-year-old’s class theme is Disney characters.
And to be honest, I’m livid. Halloween is still an ancient Irish festival, Samhain, with associated ancient Irish rituals. We may have imported the ubiquitous carved pumpkins from America but they stole the idea from us first — the pumpkins were long pre-dated by the Irish carved turnip.
Halloween also has a religious heritage, coming on the eve of All Saints’ Day and the follow up All Souls’ Day — where it has long been said the veil between us and the souls of the departed is at its thinnest, so all manner of spooky happenings are possible.
Doing away with ghosts and witches at Halloween is a bit like doing away with the story of the nativity at Christmas: it guts the festival of meaning and renders the whole thing kind of pointless.
But I’m enraged for a more important reason than that. We have an issue nowadays with our adolescents and young adults struggling with anxiety and an inability to cope with what would have previously been considered fairly minor stresses, like exam pressure or socialising with their peers.
A lot of the time we blame social media, but I think there is a far bigger culprit — us and how we raise them.
We bemoan why our young people feel incapable of dealing with normal life but don’t connect it to the fact that we — the adults — have been telling them they’re incapable of all sorts since they were small.
We’ve told them they can’t go anywhere under their own steam — even though we all did it. They can’t play on their own, out on the road with their pals. They can’t cook, do chores, talk to adults or read slightly scary fairy tales. And now this: they can’t look at another child in a witch’s costume in case they are fleetingly scared.
We’re teaching them that avoidant behaviour, which is largely a dysfunctional coping mechanism, is how they should deal with anything they don’t like and I think it’s absolutely wrong and a gross disservice to them. I don’t want people telling my children that witches and ghosts are too scary for them. They aren’t! And I don’t want them being given that message. I don’t want them being told they’re not able for stuff that they are absolutely well able for.
Because that’s what’s happening — in our eagerness to protect the hypothetical child that’s afraid of a ghost costume, we tell all children they must be avoided. And in my view it’s far worse to infantilise our children and artificially sanitise their worlds to this ludicrous extent than it is for them to see a nine-year-old with a sheet over their head and holes cut out for eyes.
If you could gift your child one thing to help them through life, resilience would be a fairly good present. We learn important coping skills over the course of our lives. One of the great tools we use in order to cope with challenges is — “I know I can get through X because previously I got through Y.” If there have been no previous Ys, the Xs will seem all the more daunting. Presenting your children with small challenges that they can safely deal with allows them to learn and is vital for their development.
I’m not banging the ‘PC gone mad’ drum, I’m saying overcoming adversity gives kids a sense of personal achievement and empowerment — and removing all opportunity for them to do so, stunts their growth making it harder for them to cope later on when real challenges arise.
And in the case of scary Halloween costumes, they also miss out on the thrill of being slightly spooked and feeling all the more grown up for it.
There are children with additional needs who may be suffering from anxiety or indeed be on the autistic spectrum. But apart from children with profound issues that should be receiving major intervention — children with additional needs ALSO need these skills and to be empowered to deal with real life going forward.
Whatever happened to telling an anxious child that there’s nothing to be scared of ? That the ‘witches’ are only children, in hats having fun? That they themselves are big and strong and well able for this and there’s lots of divilment to be had in scaring their teachers?
We should be reassuring and empowering anxious children through these situations to help them cope and believe in their own abilities. That’s far preferable to adults joining in the ridiculous narrative about witch costumes being scary that only reinforces their fears and teaches kids to avoid all challenges.
I’m far more scared of my children being exposed to misguided, modern parenting than to things that go bump in the night. And I don’t accept for one moment that it’s the right thing to do away with traditional Halloween costumes — these kind of actions do our children more harm than good.
This is what is actually frightening… Boo!