Tacy was three when we moved to Colorado. She was well-versed in the ways of urban apartment living, but living in a house in an area prone to severe weather conspired to spark two natural childhood fears: sleeping alone in the dark and thunderstorms.
She’d been sleeping alone in her own big-girl bed for more than a year, but suddenly she started creeping into our room in the middle of the night. Then she insisted that she could only sleep in her own bed if she fell asleep in our room (which we indulged, but half the time she ended up in bed with us anyway).
Meanwhile, one summer afternoon brought tornado warnings that drove Tacy’s preschool class into the hallway where they assumed the prescribed protective position, and Tacy promptly lost her mind from sheer terror. Tornadoes weren’t a threat on the cliffs atop the Hudson River. I don’t think she’d even seen a lightning strike before.
She spent the rest of the summer worriedly searching the sky for dark clouds and pestering us incessantly if she spotted any: “Is that a thunderstorm? Will it get us? Is a tornado coming? We need to go inside. We need to go inside RIGHT NOW!”
Of course, both of these fears are perfectly normal childhood fears, especially for a preschooler. That doesn’t make them any less exasperating to a parent trying unsuccessfully to calm those fears.
Think I’m unfeeling? Try leaving the park five minutes after arriving because your daughter noticed a cloud – a benign fluffy white one – in the normally cloudless sky. Have you ever shared a king-sized bed with a three year old? There’s no sharing involved; the bed is hers now. Go sleep in her room if you want any rest at all.
Scholastic, a top site for expert parenting guidance, agrees: “At or about age 4 is the most fearful time in normal development. It is an age that allows a paradoxical blend of experienced helplessness and imagined all-powerful qualities. What’s more, there is nothing contradictory about this blend in the mind of a preschooler.”
Initially I thought that Tacy’s night fears were primarily due to the move and the associated dramatic changes in her environment. But when CJ turned three last year and began creeping into our room at night herself, I wondered if it was just a rite of passage for kids that age. Similar to the evolution of Tacy’s night patterns, CJ now sleeps alone in her room, but her bedside lamp remains on all night long. (I replaced the incandescent bulb with a CFL months ago.) Perhaps when she turns five, she’ll agree to sleep with the light off, so long as the door remains open.
I’d also thought that Tacy had overcome her fears of severe weather, but I was wrong. A week ago, we were at the Dumb Friends League when it began hailing. Then a tornado warning was issued. Instead of meeting and greeting cats who were waiting for adoption, we were hustled down to the basement where Tacy curled up on my lap and grilled me about our fate. She was concerned not just for our family, but for her friends and their families, and for all of the animals in the shelter: “Are they going to bring all of them down here so that they’ll be safe too?”
Again, Scholastic notes in another piece that weather-related fears are normal for kids: “When children do not have a full understanding of the causes and effects of these elements, they can use their powerful 5- and 6-year-old minds to create both imaginary and real scenarios related to these fears.” That is, they don’t have to watch “The Wizard of Oz” to envision what might happen in the event of a tornado; their wild imaginations will concoct outcomes far more fantastic than munchkins and fields of poppies – and far more frightening too.
Three days later, Tacy and CJ were visiting friends down the street and Oliver was napping peacefully at home when another severe storm blew up. The sky turned green, fat drops began to fall, and the Emergency Alert System broke into MSNBC with a tornado warning for our county. When marble-sized hail thundered against the roof and windows, I was sufficiently alarmed to wake Oliver and carry him down to the basement.
(Aside: Tornado warnings used to mean that a tornado had touched down, but apparently they now mean what a watch used to mean – that conditions are right for a tornado to develop. I have no idea what a watch means now; we were under a watch all afternoon yesterday, even as the sun blazed down.)
Shortly after the sky cleared, the phone rang. Tacy asked breathlessly, “Did you know we had a tornado warning? Did you hear all that hail?”
Amused, I replied, “Yes, surprisingly enough the weather was exactly the same here, just down the street.”
“I cried,” she confessed. “Katie did too.”
“Why did you cry?”
“I wanted to be with you.”
Having grown up in Ohio – in a heavily populated area fairly close to more rural areas, similar to where we live now – I’ve attempted to console Tacy with my own childhood stories, including that of the Xenia tornado in 1974. My mother cautioned me repeatedly away from our French doors as golf ball-sized hail rained onto our backyard. Scholastic encourages this approach: “Fears can grow when they are not examined and expressed. Encourage children to talk about them. Tell them about a fear you had as a child.”
Unfortunately, our discussions haven’t assuaged her fears. They haven’t exacerbated them either, but even so, she spent yesterday informing me of every dark cloud she saw and inquiring regularly about the latest severe weather alerts. Eventually, in spite of my best efforts, I lost my patience:
“I don’t know. I don’t know! I DON’T KNOW! But what I do know is that if you keep bugging the crap out of me with these unanswerable questions, I’m going to send you to the basement, tornado or not. Because even when you’re making me absolutely crazy, I still would never let anything happen to you!”
Maybe she’ll be a meteorologist in thirty years. Or maybe she’ll still be scared of storms.
Or both.
What scares your kids? What scared you when you were a kid? Are you still scared?
Oh, you quoted my lovely friend Adele!
I seriously cannot think of anything my kids are afraid of. Which is not necessarily a good thing, in terms of self-preservation; nor does it keep the 4-year-old out of our bed.
(I was scared of “robbers.”)
I had a lot of fears growing up, mostly because my parents never explained anything to me.
My kids are okay I think, although Drew recently mentioned he hates clowns. Though we’ve never ever seen a “real one” – but I feel his pain.
My guy is six months, and right now he’s scared of the vacuum. I have to put him down for a nap in our room with the portable air conditioner running to drown out the sound. When I was about seven, we moved from Colorado to Rhode Island. Our house got hit by lightning the first week we lived there. I woke up on the top bunk of our metal bunk bed watching blue light dancing on our bedroom wall. I can still vividly remember it. After that, I was terrified of our house burning down. I would insist on our bedroom door being shut, so the fire wouldn’t get us. It caused huge fights with my three year old sister, who wanted the door open to see the light in the hall. Good times!
I must say, all that tornado warning stuff freaked me out yesterday. It probably shouldn’t have, since we live in the foothills, but still, it did. But Los Angeles isn’t known for it’s tornadoes.
My biggest fear as a kid was the drain at the bottom of the pool. I was a fantastic swimmer and had no problem with the water, but the drain I was sure was going to suck me in. Those things still honestly freak me out.
I have one kid afraid of the dark and one scared of spiders. The baby is scared of the vacuum. So far all of that is okay.
Declan stepped on a bee in the living room last week. Bees are working their way into a full-blown phobia now. It’s awesome.
My kids are scared of thunder for sure. And hurricanes. We really don’t get very many hurricanes here in the Midwest (uh, zero) so I’m not sure where that fear stems from.
Tornado Warnings are issued when a tornado has been spotted, it doesn’t have to have touched down anywhere, it could have begun descending from the wall cloud and gone back up. Watches mean conditions are ripe for tornados to develop.
Issa- your fear of the pool drain was not unfounded. There was a girl in MN a couple of years ago who had her intestine or something sucked out because she was sitting on a drain that didn’t have the proper cap on it.
As a kid, I was terribly afraid of the dark.
My son is scared of dust devils after recently having been in one at his playground during preschool. We live in the plains of Texas. I blogged about it here:
http://joz1234.wordpress.com/2009/03/27/my-childs-dance-with-the-dust-devil/
Every time the wind gets up now, he gets nervous. He’s my little weatherman.
My older son was afraid of wolves (“woofs”). It took me a while, but I traced it back to the first year he was here and the neighbor (who looooves Halloween) had a wolfman mask hanging up on the wall. It had was motion activated and howled if you got too close. An accessory just made for two-year old trauma.
I was afraid of flying saucers. I don’t really believe in alien life forms, but the idea still inexplicably creeps me out.
Fears are not exactly rational.
When I was five-ish lightning struck our house and started a small fire. There was minimal damage, but it inspired fear of thunderstorms. Then we moved to Kansas. And my fear turned to terror when thunderstorms often meant tornadoes. I still get sick to my stomach when it storms, and that beepbeepbeep that comes before weather warnings makes my heart skip a beat. I’m 27. So yeah, scared me then, scares me now. My husband and I have already started talking about what we’ll do when it storms for the first time in our baby’s life so I don’t scare her with my own unnecessary reactions. Fortunately, we live in Phoenix, so it’s not much of a worry.
The dark scared me as a child. Although it still makes me uneasy, it doesn’t frighten me nearly the same way.
I think we were lucky. Earthquakes don’t come with a warning, so as a child you don’t have a chance to fear them in advance. Adults never acted concerned about them because they were completely unpredictable, too, so they seemed like a non-event. As we got older and began to fear that the Earth would just start shaking randomly, my mom made it into a game. She had us spin in circles as fast as we could and then stop. It made us dizzy and we felt like the world was moving around, which made the whole concept much less frightening.
If you could find a way to turn a tornado into a game, I’d say go for it. I have no advice, though, I think earthquake games might be easier to concoct.
Thunderstorms always scared me as a child, and still do! I lived in Oklahoma, a.k.a. Tornado Alley. Anytime there was a thunderstorm I would get in my parents’ bed. Until I was 13. But being there was such a huge comfort to me, because I just knew that nothing bad would happen to me if mom was there.
I got the creeps from swarms of small insects – killer bees and army ants mostly. Those darn cheesy b-movie horror films of the 70’s spurred this.
You are doing everything right – including letting your daughter see that sometimes mommies get to the end of their ropes when the questions are irrational, and especially telling her your stories, exposing her in degrees (that feel safe) to her fears. She will learn to cope.
In the meantime, have you seen the book Scaredy Squirrel? Or Wemblerly Worried? Both excellent.
I grew up (and still live) in Ohio, and I’m terrified of tornadoes. A microburst hit my neighborhood when I was 12 and home alone. It mangled fences, tossed everything around outdoors, and I felt rain pelting me two rooms into my house from the front screen door. My mom found me sitting on the floor, shaking, in the hallway.
Cordy is four and is afraid of everything. Anything new is scary, the dark is scary, a change in routine is scary. I sometimes wish she was a little more brave.
The other day we had a microburst storm in Chicago. It erupted out of no where on a bright, hot, humid day. Suddenly it was pouring, the wind was blowing, there was thunder and lightening and I was reminded of tropical storms I had seen blow in on the weather channel.
Me, my 3yo daughter and my 7yo son sat on the front porch (or rather huddled as close to the building as we could) and watched the action. We got absolutely soaked. My almost 9yo daughter and my 6yo daughter freaked out. They decided about 20 minutes into the storm that they had to rescue our poor plants sitting on a table in the back yard and ran out to retrieve them.
They came in crying hysterically. Why? Because I mentioned that the torrential downpour could lead to flooding. They took that to mean a giant wave (from some unknown source because we are no where near the lake or a river) would deluge us or maybe our basement would fill with water to the tippy top. I don’t know but nothing I said would calm them down. I’ve lived in this house for 20 years (since I was 12) and we’ve never had a drop of water in our basement and I’ve seen it flood but that means the street fills with water and nothing more.
The two sat in the living room hugging each other and crying, screaming every time a clap of thunder shook the house and begging me to just come inside.
Our back yard did flood and the kids laughed as the pool toys floated on the patio and rocks that surround our pool.
It was about that age (8/9) that I became terrified of storms. Thanks to a tornado scare while staying with my aunt in Michigan while my parents were having a date. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I grew to appreciate storms (thanks mostly to watching shows on the Discover channel) but I still wake up in a panic with a loud clap of thunder in the night and when the wind kicks up I check all the lanterns (we did lose power for 3 hours that day of the storm…spent them in the pool because it was 90+ degrees outside) and make a checklist in my head of things I would have to do if we needed to make a mad, dark, midnight dash to the basement. Hasn’t happened yet.