Written by Naomi from More With Four

“Night-Night, Sleep Tight, Don’t Let the Bed Bugs Bite. If they do, squeeze ’em tight and they won’t come back another night.”

I can’t sleep!

I remember my mother saying this to me when she tucked me into bed. It seems like a harmless little rhyme, but as a kid with a fantastic imagination it was more than a little rhyme. It brought images to my mind of little bugs biting me in the night. Suddenly, the little pile of clothes on the floor of my room looked more like a strange creature in the dark, and all the things I saw throughout my day replayed in my mind and kept me from closing my eyes for a while. I don’t think we realize as parents just how many scary things our children are exposed to. I am reminded of this as another Halloween approaches.

Halloween is a weird tradition

Every year I question this tradition. Why do we send our children to strangers’ doors and allow them to accept candy? Don’t we always warn them to never take candy from strangers? Are we not sending a confusing message here? Oh, it’s okay to approach strangers’ houses on this one dark and stormy night of the year as long as you are wearing a costume. Is this a bit strange? It seems that the scarier the decorations, the better. My daughter wants me to decorate our house with even more frightful decorations each year. “It’s not scary enough”, she says. Well, I was kind of scared of the bats, ghosts, tombstones, and hands coming out of the ground! These are the images we see everywhere around Halloween time.

I’m surprised children even want to go trick or treating. Do they not remember the Hans Christian Anderson story about Hansel and Gretel? When these children approached a house of candy, there was a witch inside who tried to eat them!

We are scaring our children

I guess we have been scaring our children since birth in preparation for Halloween. The classic nursery rhymes for example, leave horrible images in mind. In rock a bye baby, the cradle falls and down comes baby. And in three blind mice the poor critters get their heads cut off with a carving knife! I could give more examples (clowns!) but I think you get the idea. My son is terrified of the tooth fairy. And he has not even lost his teeth yet! He is afraid when she is to “arrive” at our house for his brother or sisters lost tooth. We had to lie to him the one night and tell him she wasn’t coming just so he could fall asleep. I guess the idea of a tiny little fairy flying in to the room in the middle of the night creeped him out. I can see why. What’s next? We send our children up onto the lap of a large strange man with a white beard and red suit while he asks them what they would like. If they are lucky, he will sneak into their houses in the middle of the night and leave us toys.

Sleep tight children! Don’t let the bed bugs bite…

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