When I was eight, my father offered to buy me a book from the bookstore while out in town and I, having devoured the first three in the series, requested The Miserable Mill, the fourth book in Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events. In this installment, orphans Violet, Klaus, and Sunny, having run out of relatives willing to take them in, are sent to Lucky Smells Lumber Mill where they are made to work. The evil Count Olaf, always scheming to steal their fortune, teams up with the mill’s optometrist, Dr. Orwell. While fixing his glasses, Orwell hypnotizes Klaus, leading to a climax in which Klaus, hypnotized, nearly kills a man by strapping him to a log and pushing it through a buzz saw. My father did not know this happened in the book, but he looked at it skeptically all the same and asked, “Do you really want this?”
I really did. Many of us, looking back on what we read as children, might be surprised to recall just how dark our favorite stories were. Whether it was the Grimm Brothers’ classic fairy tales, Neil Gaiman’s Coraline, Mary Downing Hahn’s Wait Till Helen Comes, or my favorite, A Series of Unfortunate Events, children’s stories are rife with grisly, gruesome, and frightening content, capable of fueling nightmares for days. Perhaps then it’s unsurprising that a 2016 survey found that a third of UK parents avoid reading scary stories to their children.
However, just because such content may seem dark, doesn’t mean children shouldn’t be reading it. Scholar Jerry Griswold suggests in his book Feeling Like a Kid that scariness is a key element of children’s literature and data consistently suggests that there are benefits to children reading scary stories. Reading fiction has long been believed to help develop empathy; in doing so, readers identify with and put themselves in the position of fictional characters. Neuroscience further supports this: researchers at Emory University detected that reading fiction can have biological impacts on the brain that linger for days. When children read scary stories, they are able to experience frightening situations safely, knowing it isn’t real, but achieving the sense that they have overcome their fears.
The safety of the frightening made fictitious is crucial to this. It’s the same reason that children often pretend-play that they are orphans and other situations that would be horrifying if they were real. Playing out situations or vicariously experiencing them via literature allows children to safely prepare how they might cope were they actually presented with a similarly scary situation in real life. This phenomenon has been explored in children’s books dealing with bigotry; a qualitative study by Wanda Brooks and Gregory Hampton concluded that using Mildred Taylor’s Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry—a historical children’s book about a Black family living in 1930s Mississippi—to teach students about racism was far “safer than [students] encountering racism first-hand.”
Fiction is a vital tool for children’s self development and that includes exposure to things adults might worry are too scary. On that note, whether it’s a book or playing pretend, children are often their own best censors and will typically choose not to read or engage in play that is too alarming for them. With all that in mind, not only should parents read their children scary stories, but it is crucial for their development that children are given the opportunity to face their fears through fiction.
[Katarina Dulude, she/they]
Instagram: @katarina.violet
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