Oct. 11, 2006
Do you remember all those superstitious childhood games we used to play that were so full of mystery and intrigue? Like that one called "Light As A Feather, Stiff As A Board?" Someone would lie down on the floor, the rest of us would each put two fingers under her, and then we’d begin our magical chant that would somehow reduce the weight of the reclining person and allow us to lift her with ease.
"Light as a feather, stiff as a board. Light as a feather, stiff as a board."
Did you play that one? It’s funny to see now that there is probably a science lesson in that game having to do with mass and density!
Then there was the "Bloody Mary" game. My friend told me an embellished story of England’s "Bloody Mary" and said that if you stand in front of a mirror and chant the name "Bloody Mary" three times, her image will appear. We tried it together and I also braved the mirror-chant all alone, but of course, it never worked. Still, I remember telling my mom about it and she got very serious. "Don’t do that! When you play those types of games you are inviting evil spirits to come into you. That is how people get possessed."
I never saw my mother as superstitious. This was our religious belief. Good spirits are very real in Christian religions, as well as evil ones. In the Mormon faith, one-third of God’s spirit children were cast down to earth before any human beings were born because they rebelled and followed Lucifer.
I grew up with the oft-told idea that evil spirits outnumber living humans and they specifically like to target God’s elect. I had the understanding that there were multiple evil spirits following me at any given time. Serious adult reactions about silly childhood games, combined with my religious beliefs, incited an enormous fear of evil spirits.
The belief in spirits is one I am happy not to pass on to my children. If there are no spirits, there are no ghosts, let alone evil spirit-demons whose only purpose it is to overcome you! As non-believers we have the advantage of protecting our children from unnecessary fears of the imagination.
When I was a missionary in the Philippines, I challenged one of my Filipina companions on her belief in aswongs, or witches that are half-woman, half-dog. According to Filipino tradition, aswongs have wiry hair and eat babies from a pregnant mother’s womb. The only recourse is to burn a rubber tire. Apparently, aswongs hate the smell of burning rubber.
The fact that I didn’t believe in witches disturbed my mission roommate. She quoted passages about witches in the Bible to prove that I was wrong. She even told me that the reason I didn’t believe was because I was lacking in faith!
I love that I can state unequivocally to my children that there are no evil spirits, no ghosts, no mysterious and unnamed forces that can hurt them. Certain things exist that we can measure, observe and discover. Other things are just the stories of humankind’s imagination. I have found success in soothing my children’s fears by telling them that someone made up the scary creature that they are worried about. Vampires? A creative writer made them up! Witches? Made up. Ghosts? Made up as well.
In my experience, exposing children to fiction and having them participate in story-telling or fiction-writing themselves helps them accept the idea of a "made-up" creature’s non-existence.
My kids attend an unusual type of school where they read all kinds of literature for hours every day. At the end of their first hour of reading they spend time in a "writer’s workshop" where they use their earlier reading as a seed idea to write something of their own. They write fiction, memoirs, poetry and other genres every day. The school does such a great of job making them feel like writers that they even like to write stories in their off-time while they’re at home -- books they are sure they will be able to publish!
I think that it is this active encouragement of their own imagination that helps them understand that fictional creatures don’t actually exist and that someone just made it up in a story. They know very well what it means to create an imaginary being in their books, and they understand that their own new creature isn’t real.
Combining the kids’ experiences as imaginative creators with a good foundation in science does well to enforce this. They learn that real mysteries have scientific explanations. There is a reason we were able to lift our friend with two fingers after chanting, "Light as a feather, stiff as a board." There are all kinds of factual experiences that defy what our own reasoning would tell us and there are scientific laws to explain why.
On the other hand, I tell my kids that when it comes to ghosts, there is no substantial scientific evidence. People have believed in ghosts for a very long time, yet we have not been able to discover any trace of their actual existence. Someone made them up.
For whatever reason, kids and teens seem to have an insatiable desire for spooky stories, mysteries to ponder, the endless possibilities of the imagination. It can be fun when playing with friends, but terrifying when they are alone later at night in their rooms. There are plenty of substantial dangers that exist to cause our children anxiety. Fortunately my own kids will have less anxiety about the non-existent dangers that plagued me with fear when I was young.
Noell Hyman writes for her blog, AgnosticMom.com. She has been blogging since August of 2005. Relatively new to the humanist landscape, Noell declared herself a humanist some time in the year of 2002 after leaving religion, specifically the Mormon Church. A stay-at-home mother of three young children, Noell's aim is to reach other non-religious parents who find themselves isolated in the struggle to raise a healthy family without religion. Noell wants to make "Agnostic Mom" a humanist and secular household name. Visit: www.AgnosticMom.com
prev story