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Really scary stuff A child's age often affects what frightens him Tuesday, October 31, 2000 By Gary Rotstein, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
There will be a lot of children on the streets tonight, and almost as many potentially frightening images for them to behold.
The advice given to parents is to be aware of what their children can handle, and be especially careful to protect or reassure children who are in preschool, kindergarten or just beyond.
Joanne Cantor, a University of Wisconsin professor of communication, is among researchers who have found children 6 and younger react much differently to visual images than those who are a few years older and able to distinguish between fantasy and reality. She wrote the 1998 book, "Mommy I'm Scared: How TV and Movies Frighten Children and What We Can Do To Protect Them."
"They are intensely affected by how things look," she said of young children. "If something looks scary, like a vicious animal or a grotesque monster with a distortion like maybe three eyes or two heads or a horrible scar, that is going to be really scary to them."
The hard part for parents on and before Halloween, when television, movie theaters and even toy stores abound with frightening images, is they can't always gauge their children's tolerance level until after the fact. It's an equation everyone figures out as part of a child's growing process.
"Sometimes kids like being scared just a little bit, something they can master and feel good about," Cantor noted. "If it goes beyond that, it can cause real disturbance in sleeping, longtime fears, or hesitancy to go to places they would not normally feel in danger."
The film "Poltergeist" is one of the most frightening to children because its horrors are centered on the ordinary objects with which they normally feel so comfortable: the living-room television, a clown in their room, a tree outside the bedroom window. In one case after seeing the film, a boy begged and persuaded his father to cut down a nearby tree because he was so frightened by it, Cantor recalled.
"These movies that cause really intense reactions also cause indelible memories," Cantor said. She and a co-researcher found in a study of college students that 90 percent of participants had had some kind of intense media fright reaction in childhood or adolescence, resulting in behavior such as crying, screaming, trembling, nausea or clinging to their companion.
The younger they were when viewing a scary movie or TV program, the longer-lasting the effects, and 26 percent reported some kind of "residual anxiety."
None of that necessarily stops teen-agers and others from seeking out frightening experiences, helping create the profitable popularity of "The Exorcist," now in re-release, or of "The Blair Witch Project" and its new sequel.
The most popular reading material for children is in a similar vein, with 215 million copies of the macabre "Goosebumps" series, targeted at ages 7-12, sold since 1992. Cantor said children can at least exert enough control over that medium that it's less of a risk to them.
"Kids can create their own images, but these things aren't inflicted on a child the way it would happen on television, where a kid can stumble into a movie or show without any intention of seeing it," Cantor noted. "With a book, a kid makes a conscious decision to keep reading it."
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