Little House on the Prairie + Harry Potter = Nightmares

When I was about six, I was watching a TV show (I think it was Little House on the Prairie) when the two little girls on the screen knelt down and prayed, “Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.” That was it for me. My days of sleeping soundly through the night were over. I became terrified that I, or someone I loved, would die while I was sleeping. Talk about nightmares. My parents couldn’t figure out what was scaring me and I didn’t know how to explain it to them.

Years later, I was reminded of this when babysitting for my nine year old niece. She had recently read the first book in the Harry Potter series and I rented the movie version for us to watch together. A few days later, I got an annoyed call from my brother. “Thanks a lot for letting her watch that,” he said. “She’s been having nightmares all week.”

It hadn’t occurred to me that watching a movie that was made for kids, especially since she had already read the book, would give Madison nightmares. Unfortunately, you can’t always predict what is going to scare kids. It might be something as innocent as an episode of Little House on the Prairie.

So if you can’t always prevent the nightmares, how can you help your child to cope with them? We’ve all heard that you should just carry your child back to bed and tuck him in again, while explaining that there’s nothing to be afraid of. Good theory, but pretty tough to do in practice when your little boy or girl is terrified.

CafeMom offers a different approach in the DailyBuzz post Nightmares: Helping Kids Conquer Them. Not only is this solution kind and creative, it has the added bonus of smelling good!

And one tip from me: Don’t let them watch Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone until they are really old, even if they swear up and down that they’re not scared. — Lindsay Armstrong