The Safety of Stories: How Fiction Can Calm Fears
If you take a walk down almost any suburban street in the United States during September and October and you’ll be greeted by a full display of Halloween décor. The era of a few carved pumpkins and a stray spider web the day before Halloween is long gone. Americans now spend about four billion dollars on Halloween decorations, and much of that ends up in front yards.
For young children, this can feel overwhelming. They meet towering monsters on the way to the bus stop, pass glowing skeletons during afternoon walks and ride bikes past yards filled with zombies and ghosts. Their senses are busy taking in sights they can’t quite understand. For mothers who work hard to cultivate truth, beauty and goodness in their homes, it can feel tempting to hunker down and wait out the month.
Chesterton offers some grounding:
“Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.”
One afternoon, while walking with my children, my 6 year old son stopped and stared at a nine-foot Frankenstein in a neighbor’s lawn.
“What is that?” he asked.
“That’s Frankenstein’s monster,” I said, nudging everyone along before my dog could repeat last year’s embarrassing incident in which he tried, with great confidence, to claim several decorations as his personal territory.
“What’s Frankenstein’s monster?” came the next question.
This is where I should confess that while my schooling checked all the boxes, it wasn’t exactly a living one. I passed the test on Frankenstein in high school, but the story never came alive for me. Still, my six-year-old was asking, and he deserved more than a shrug.
So I told him what I remembered: that Mary Shelley wrote a book about a scientist who created a monster, that she imagined this being and he came from her story. That seemed to settle him. The giant figure in the yard wasn’t a threat. It belonged to a story. It had a place. It was fiction, and that made it safer.
As we kept walking, the questions grew. What about vampires? Werewolves? Ghosts? Where did those come from? What stories were they part of? He wanted me to untangle what he was seeing each day— what was real, what was imagined, and how to make sense of it all.
There is real comfort in knowing the stories. Chesterton’s point holds: children already know the world has frightening things in it. They sense shadows and dangers long before we name them. What they need is a way to understand those fears, and even more, a way to see them overcome. Learning the origins of these figures gave my son a foothold. They weren’t nameless threats scattered through the neighborhood. They were characters in stories with beginnings and endings, limits and defeats.
And that knowledge eased his fear.
I have never been one for frightening things. It may be a sensitive spirit or an overactive nervous system, but tales of gore and horror are ones I actively try to avoid.
There are times where we need to rest in the safety of stories. We need to understand where the anxiety inducing moments come from. My current education involves reading through several gothic novels, finding the origin of these stories so I can make them safer for my children, more palatable. Not necessarily appropriate-but worthy of noticing in a meaningful way.
We don’t have to divert our eyes from the hard. We can look at it with clarity, name it and help our children see that even the darkest tales have an end—and often, a conqueror.
