What to say when your child is scared of the dark

The dark is one of the first fears almost every child meets. The room they played in all day turns strange at night, a coat on the door becomes a shape, and the mind fills the quiet with something waiting. It feels completely real, because to them it is.

What to say in the moment

Stay close, and look with them rather than talking them out of it.

• Believe the feeling: “That looked scary. I’m here.” You don’t have to agree there’s a monster to agree the fear is real.
• Go and look together: turn toward the shape, not away from it. “Let’s see what it is.” Showing a child the coat is far steadier than insisting from across the room that nothing is there.
• Name what’s actually here: “That’s your dressing gown. This is the door. Here’s my hand.” Real things, one at a time, shrink the imagined one.

What to avoid

“There’s nothing to be scared of” rarely lands, because the child already feels that there is. And “big kids aren’t scared of the dark” just adds shame to fear, so now they have two things to hide. The goal isn’t to make the fear silly, it’s to make it smaller and known.

The idea underneath

Seneca noticed that we suffer more often in imagination than in reality. The mind runs ahead and builds something larger than the thing itself, and we feel the whole of it before anything has actually happened. His practice was simple: look carefully at what is truly here, right now, rather than at the shape the mind has drawn.

For a child, that becomes one clear question they can learn to ask in the dark: is this here, or is it a shadow? A real thing you can meet and handle. A shadow you can look at until it’s just a shadow again.

The words to keep

When the light is on and everyone is calm, give them a line to carry back into the dark:

“Is it here, or is it a shadow?”

That’s the whole of The Shadow Before the Door, a Stoic Sprout story about the frightening shape that turns out to be nothing waiting after all. And for the daytime worries that grow the same way, what to say when your child is worried uses the same gentle idea.

Mark Fitzgerald · Founder of Stoic Sprout

Mark made Stoic Sprout as a dad in Melbourne, for his own young children, with calm stories drawn from the real Stoic philosophers. More about Mark →

Stoic Sprout builds calm and character. It isn't therapy or medical advice. If your child is struggling in a way that worries you, please talk to your GP or another professional.