This past Halloween, schools across the country implemented policies restricting children’s costumes.  In Plainville, Ill., children were encouraged to dress as animals or food.  In Burbank, Cal. kids were told they could not wear masks or carry swords or weapons, not even fake swords or weapons.  Los Angeles’s Riverside Drive Elementary banned masks, weapons, fake fingernails, and costumes demeaning gender, religion, race, nationality or handicapped status, though the distinction between a costume demeaning any of the above and one simply depicting same was not drawn.  Children were asked to “portray positive images.”  One suggestion was a box of Wheaties.  Whole grain Wheaties would presumably be favored over traditional Wheaties.

My son went as a robber (currently his biggest fear).  My temptation, after reading how schools were sanitizing Halloween, was to arm him with a real gun and live ammunition, but I was afraid if he actually shot somebody or knocked over a liquor store, it would hurt his chances of getting into an Ivy League college.

I’m kidding of course.

We have no hopes of getting him into an Ivy League college.

But am I the only one who thinks elementary schools are missing the point, by a wide margin?  Adopting practices to ensure a safe positive non-scary politically correct Halloween is like throwing a low-cal non-fat carb-free sugarless Thanksgiving Feast.  Once a year, you’re supposed to do the opposite of what you do the rest of the year, just so you can appreciate the difference.  Once a year, you indulge your impulses, eschew moderation, give in, relax and realize, the next day, that civilization did not collapse—that it’s stronger than that.

Moreover, denying a child the opportunity to scare or be scared might have larger consequences.  The reason to put on a mask and scare a kid is to take the mask off, and laugh, and teach him not everything that looks scary is scary.  The reason to turn out the lights and tell a scary story is to turn the lights back on when you’re done and demonstrate that fear has a beginning, a middle and an end, but especially an end.  Schools that strive for hyper-safety, and forbid competitive play on the playground, or tell the boys they can’t wrestle, or only teach stories about hungry caterpillars and goodnight moons, do a disservice.

According to renowned child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim, in his classic work, The Uses of Enchantment (1976, p.10): “The deep inner conflicts originating in our primitive drives and our violent emotions are all denied by much of children’s literature, and so a child is not helped in coping with them… Children not having their ids in conscious control, need stories which permit at least fantasy satisfaction of these ‘bad’ tendencies, and specific models for their sublimation.”

In other words, children, as they develop emotionally, apart from physically or cognitively, begin to experience all the darker feelings adults know, violent urges, jealousy, envy, anger, shame, hurt. Denying them the right to explore these feelings symbolically, through play, denies them permission to feel them, when they have no choice but to feel them, so they repress them as unacceptable, having been given no alternative way to overcome them. (I fear I can’t write enough about fear. See here for more.)

Bettelheim notes that children depend on fantasy to imaginatively resolve troubling issues, such that the wider and more varied a child’s fantasy life, the more tools he’ll have, later on, to cope with adult realities. It’s like an emotional immune system that grows stronger only if it’s challenged.

Maurice Sendak’s classic 1963 children’s book, Where the Wild Things Are, is a perfect example, a story where a mischievous boy, Max, acts up, gets sent to his room, escapes, travels to a world of scary monsters, joins them, becomes their king, gets it out of his system, and goes home again, where he finds he’s still loved, and his supper is still hot. Max’s darker feelings are acknowledged, honored, given full voice, celebrated and, in the end, subdued but never denied.  Now Where the Wild Things Are has been made into a brilliant film—one, some parents are complaining, is too scary. When Sendak was asked by an interviewer what he would say to parents concerned that their kids might be frightened by the film, he said what Bruno Bettelheim probably wished he could have said, were he not a renowned child psychologist.

“I’d tell them to go to hell,” Sendak replied.

And to the kids who think the movie is too scary?

“Go home. Or wet your pants. Do whatever you like.”

There are plenty of real things for children to be afraid of as they grow. Hopefully, my son will have had some practice facing his fears, having rehearsed it in his fantasies. Halloween teaches kids how to joke about their fears, the way I joked, earlier, about my son getting into college. Of course we want the best schools for him. Before that, however, we want him to be happy and well adjusted, in which case, let the wild rumpus begin.

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