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SALT LAKE CITY — During Halloween, scary images and costumes can often frighten small children. Here are several tips to help them overcome those fears.
When monsters invaded the imaginations of the four Ibarra children, Gennaveeve Ibarra came up with a pretty powerful concoction — monster spray.
It's a spray bottle of water with a label that reads "Monster Be Gone."
"They all got to spray under the bed," she said. "They all got to spray in the closet and outside the windows. We killed all the monsters. They were extinct."
University Neuropsychiatric Institute psychiatrist, Dr. Benjamin Chan, said when kids get scared of things that "go bump in the night", they take cues from their parents.
"It all goes back to how you handle it as a parent," Chan said. "If you're scared, if you're upset, the children will pick up on that."
Chan said "monster spray" is simply a physical manifestation of the parents' confidence. Ibarra said the spray worked "because they were in control of it."
"They were in charge of getting rid of the monsters," Ibarra said. "They were in control, so it kind of gave them power."
On the eve of Halloween with plenty of scary images around every corner, Chan gave a few suggestions for handling small children's fears of frightening images real and imagined.
Acknowledge the fear
"You listen to them," Chan said. "You always let the child say what scares them."
Help the child create a new ending to a nightmare
"So if it's about a dragon, or a witch, try to have the parent sit down and create an ending where it's a happy reassuring ending," Chan said. "The witch turned out to be friendly."
Read
"Read a lot of stories, where the child in the story is brave and overcomes adversity, is confronted by something scary, in the end triumphs," Chan said.
Play games in the dark
"If it's specifically something under the bed or in the closet, try to have a game like a treasure hunt or a flashlight tag or something," Chan says.
Use "magical" objects like monster spray
"It's kind of like lying to your children in a way," Chan said. However, he said that by so doing "You kind of empower them."
Caden Ibarra, 6, still insists that monsters are real and living in his bedroom.
"They're very small and I can look at very small stuff," Caden said.
Thanks to "Monster Be Gone" and his parents, the "small creatures" don't keep him up at night.
"I look at Halloween as an educational experience," Chan said. "Children are exposed to all these different images and parents can teach their children about these. If the child can see the parent be strong, be confident, be brave, children pick up those qualities and that's kind of part of the developmental process."
