Subjecting Children to Fear-Inducing Events Such as Halloween Act - Essay Example

despite the fact that quite a number of the children enjoy the Halloween images, a large number of the children development experts believe that the holiday psychologically damages most of the children. These experts favour the protection of the children from the intense effects of Halloween. Other experts argue that fear is a natural human emotion, and as such, it is harmful to preventing children from being afraid. It is wrong to shield children from fear-inducing events like Halloween, and thus, it is important to subject them to human emotions of fear. Such situations act as means of training children to have fear-management skills and thus are very important.

According to Pain and Susan (2), fear is an emotion induced by a perceived threat, which causes people or animals to draw away from any fear-causing situation immediately they get that feeling. Fear is very important to children and other people due to a number of reasons. As children grow up, we expect them to become bold and brave adults. A brave person is one who can tackle any situation whenever it occurs to them. Therefore, a brave person does not run away from a challenging situation but faces it with the right senses. This is the main reason why children should face both fear-inducing and scary situations such as Halloween.

Halloween, being one of the most controversial festivals in the history of Americans continuously receives positive and negative criticisms. One of the major reasons for its negative criticisms is the kind of images it draws into the minds of young children. Halloween images of children dressed in scary costumes create anxiety and fear among the young children. This is the main reason why most people argue that children should not be part of the event. Further, experts point out that most of the children undergo traumatizing situations if they were to face such situations. On the other hand, their opponents argue that fear is a necessity to the growth and development of a human being. At an early age, the biggest source of fear for young children is Halloween. Therefore, they should take part in the event for experiencing the scary images of Halloween. These images make them brave people in the future, making them confident enough to handle any challenging situation.

Life is full of fear and anxiety, as it is characterized by incidences of high levels of uncertainty and anarchy. People cannot choose the kind of situations that they pass through in their course of life. Therefore, we have to be always vigilant enough to handle any situation whenever it happens. Situations that are likely to cause fear to adult people include the site of an accident, adventurous situations, very serious decisions that are very costly, new places and meeting new people. Emotions characterizing such situations are overwhelming to the people involved. While it is impossible to avoid such situations, we can prepare for them by having the ability to control our fear. Too much fear could escalate a problem, especially in the event of the happening of an accident. A very emotional person, with little experience of emotional situations that require braveness, can panic and cause an avoidable accident. The fact that such a person has no knowledge of facing such a situation, as well as what they should do in such circumstances leads to panic and loss of critical thinking. As such, they end up worsening a situation that if handled properly, is preventable.

One of the reasons why people and especially parents should subject their children to fear-inducing situations is in order to prepare them for such eventualities, whenever they occur. The fact that we cannot predict the occurrence of a deadly situation should be reason enough for the children to go through Halloween and Halloween-like festivals. The higher the number of times an individual faces a fearful situation, the more they develop tactics of dealing with the situation whenever they happen. The lesser the number of times an individual faces fearful situations; the lower is their skills in reacting to a fearful situation in the future.

While a banker could have to deal with an arrogant client, a teacher could find him/herself caught up in the middle of a student demonstration, while a phone operator risks fire. All these require some degree of fear management, which develops in a person from an early age. Therefore, it is important for everybody to have fear-management skills.

We cannot avoid fear in our lives, as it is part of human beings. We cannot avoid fearful situations, just like we cannot avoid working. While people cannot acquire braveness and fear management skills in their old beings, the best way to teach these skills is as one grows old. Since children face few fear-generating events, Halloween plays a great role in teaching children how to be brave people in the future.