When I was a kid, my parents read a chapter book out loud to us most nights for an hour or so before bedtime.
Sometime when I was in grade school, my mom chose The Hiding Place by Corrie TenBoom; a story about a Christian family who hid Jews, got caught, and then got sent to concentration camps.
I don’t know why exactly the stories about the Nazis got to me, but I can vividly remember lying in bed, scared stiff.
This makes no sense to me as I look back on it because it’s not like Nazis were a real and present danger in 1980s America.
Maybe it’s that the darkness of it all just really sank in for me; the evil felt so real.
Even now, I have a hard time getting into World War II novels because they often feel too heavy to me. And I remember when I started watching Call the Midwife, I was relieved when I discovered the first episode began safely after the end of World War II.
Oh! I also remember watching a handful of episodes of Rescue 911, and there was this one episode where a guy went to dinner with his wife, killed her, stashed her in the trunk, and dumped her body.
Again, this was not a real and present danger for 10 year old me, but I was really hecked out after watching that.
My childhood fears were quite irrational, I guess.
When I was very young I was convinced that every time we left our house, we would come back and it would be on fire, or have burnt down while we were gone. Where this came from, I don’t know. But every time we drove back to our house, I breathed a sign of relief (and was slightly surprised) that the house was still standing. This fear only got worse when we got cats, because the thought of the cats being trapped in a blaze was even worse than the idea of the house being gone! Nobody in our family had ever lost a home to a fire, and I had never seen a house on fire in real life, so to this day I don’t know where that fear came from. It got better as I got older.
I was terrified of being kidnapped by a stranger. This was the era of the kids-on-the-milk carton, Adam Walsh, and all that. So I was convinced that somebody would drive up in a car and just scoop me up and kidnap me. I remember being about 8 or 9 years old, and playing on our driveway (we had a house on a corner), and the garage door was just open about a few feet, to keep it from getting too hot inside during the summer. A purple sports car turned into our street and came up the driveway, and I panicked and dove for the garage, banging my head hard on the door! After I scrambled into the garage, I looked back and saw the car backing back out–looking back, I realize now that the driver was just using our driveway to turn around after making a wrong turn (lots of people did this), but at the time I was convinced the person had meant to kidnap me and I had only thwarted him (it was always a him) by hiding in the garage.
The funny (sort of?) thing is that we all got this impression that strangers are the most likely to abduct children, but the statistics show that the vast majority of children are abducted by someone they know!
This article says that only 0.1 percent are abducted by strangers, actually. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-wisconsin-missinggirl-data/kidnapped-children-make-headlines-but-abduction-is-rare-in-u-s-idUSKCN1P52BJ
I think this is a very good reason to be super careful what we allow into the minds of our children. I read Corrie ten Boom’s book in high school but I think I was old enough to handle it at that point.
My childhood fear was spiders & heights. I was terrified of spiders. I grew up in poor rural Appalachia with no indoor plumbing. We would have huge wood spiders in the outhouse….as big as a man’s hand. The sit of a huge spider would paralyze me with fear. I would beg anyone to go check out the outhouse for me & kill any spiders they would see & I often got into trouble for going out behind the house in the open.
Once when I was around 14, I woke up one morning to see a huge spider on the ceiling over my bed! Again….paralyzed by fear….I screamed like a crazy person until my mom came to see who was killing me. She was not happy at all with me.
Once when I was dating my husband, we were walking down the sidewalk of our college campus when a spider ran across in front of us. He learned very quickly just how big my fear was & it was part of our marriage vows that he take care of any spider near me. Even still he rolls his eyes at me & says…’Even kings palaces have spiders’…referring to Proverbs 30:28.
I can handle them a little better now. We have brown recluse in our basement & I can actually kill them now when I see them. Becoming a mother gives you courage I guess.
I don’t blame my mom for reading the book to us; I think it was just an issue with me that she couldn’t have anticipated. My little sister did not experience the same thing and obviously she was younger than me.
It’s so hard to know what will scare our kids and what will not!
Fear of Nazis is not irrational! Those who ignore the Holocaust, bigotry, deportations, intolerance based on race or religion–those are the irrational ones. To say it could not have happened again in the 1980s or today is not realistic in my opinion.
Couldn’t agree more. Fear of Nazis is fear of the evil that exists in the world and the terror it causes when left to grow unchecked.
Well, it’s not that I think it’s irrational to be concerned about/aware of that type of thing.
The irrational part to me is that when I was 10 years old, I was not in immediate danger of being hauled off to a concentration camp from my bunkbed.
I’m not saying it could never happen; I’m just saying it was unlikely to happen to me at the time I was scared.
I vividly remember my terror of “Nightmare on Elm Street.” I’ve still never seen any of the movies, but I was about seven years old when one of the later ones came out–number 3, I think–and the song from the soundtrack featuring Will Smith (then known as The Fresh Prince of Bel Air 🙂 was on the radio all the time, My older brother told me the story, and I slept by my mom’s bed for several nights after that. Thanks, bro.
SNAKES! Oh I hated them as a child and still do. I had nightmares as a kid and sometimes still do today. We can have rattlesnakes where I live which is one reason I keep chickens and guinea hens. The dogs help too.
I also hate vampire movies. That’s irrational!
House fire. Not precisely irrational, but thankfully not super high probability.
The dark. I still hate absolute darkness. Even something as small as the glow from the numbers on a clock radio is comforting to me.
The first time I watched The Wizard of Oz, I ran out of the room crying because of the flying monkeys. It was a long time before I watched it again.
Not being able to find my glasses. I was blind as a bat, able to read only the top line on the eye testing chart, and it filled me with terror that I might have to go through life without my glasses. Some nights I would obsess about it so much that I would sleep with my glasses on, just in case there was a fire. When I first discovered cheap on line glasses companies, I went a bit crazy and ordered many, many pairs.
What I was afraid of, I mostly still am — heights (to a ridiculous degree) and spiders. I trace my fear of spiders to when I was a very young child, taking a bath with my sister, and my dad stuck his head in to see if we were both okay and not just playing around in the tub. His eyes got big and he lunged toward me, slapping me hard on my shoulder. An enormous spider fell off my shoulder. I started crying and he tried to comfort me, but that was all it took — I’ve had the shudders when I see spiders ever since, although I have learned to kill them myself.
Since I grew up in foothills country, it’s kind of funny that I don’t like heights. We went to Lookout Mountain and that area as a family and we were walking carefully across a gorge on a suspension bridge with a lot of other people of all ages, when a couple of teen boys thought it would be funny to start swinging it. The adults immediately started yelling at the boys to stop, and we were all hanging tightly onto the ropes and crouching down to try to keep our balance. The boys finally stopped it, and I feel sure they were reported – they were certainly chewed out by a number of people. I was terrified of anything high after that.
What I used to fear, that I no longer do, was something or someone being there in the near dark that I couldn’t quite make out – it always turned out to be something innocuous, like a robe hanging over the back of a chair. But in near darkness, with my near-sighted vision, I just couldn’t tell what I was seeing. I would crawl under the covers and hide from it.
I was petrified of the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz. When she showed up at the Tin Woodman’s house in the movie, I’d make my parents turn off the TV. It really irked my older sisters. We only had one TV back then.
A had (and still have) a lot of “silly” fears. Movies are one….or actually any animal in a movie. My cousin is 4 years older than me and we were raised like siblings. That means we would go to movies that I wasn’t old enough for. The Gremlins movie, Pet Cemetary, the big plant from Little Shop of Horrors (and even more so, just the shadow of when the man kills someone to feed the plant…cannot see anything but that was enough)….they still get to me. I cannot watch any movie with animals. Maybe a super happy Disney movie but that’s it…
Werewolves! I can’t remember, but I guess I saw a werewolf movie. At night I would be terrified that my 2 brothers would turn into werewolves. I tried to console myself that I could then run into my parents’ room…then my imagination told me my parents would turn into werewolves too. Of course my brothers perpetuated my fear (they were twins and 4 years older than me).