What is fear?
We all experience fear. Fear is a natural response to feeling threatened. But what causes a fear response can differ from person to person and across the lifespan. Children’s perceptions of what is scary change as their brain develops throughout childhood (see our post from Monday for more information). What is scary to a toddler is very different from what is scary to a school-aged child due to the way their brains process experiences.
Regardless of a child’s age or developmental stage, fear can lead to many negative experiences. The effects of fear can include feelings of anxiety or worry as well as sleep disturbances like not wanting to go to bed or having nightmares. These fear responses can linger long after a child initially experiences a scary event or image. Due to a phenomenon known as stimulus reaction, events and images that would scare children in the real world produce a similar fear reaction when they are viewed through television or movies.
Does media content make kids feel fear?
Given the effects of fear on children, and the potential for media to cause fear, researchers have spent many years exploring how, when, and why children experience fear from media. Before we dive into the research, we want to note that the majority of evidence for a connection between fear and media exposure is based on survey and interview studies rather than experiments. This is because it is unethical to design an experimental test that purposely causes children short or long term harm through fear, so research has focused on asking children (and parents) to self-report previous media experiences. Despite the lack of experiments, there are decades of survey and interview research to examine children’s fears from the media.
As early as the 1930s, research began to explore children’s fear reactions to media content. A survey in 1933 found that 93% of children said they had felt scared while watching movies. More recently, research has confirmed that most preschool and elementary school aged children have experienced a fear reaction to media content. The majority of parents in one study said that their child had expressed fear about something they saw on TV happening in real life. In a study interviewing children about their fears, 76% of children explained a specific time they remember being afraid of a movie or TV show. These children also reported wishing they had not seen the scary content. Another study found that more than half of children ages seven and younger had even been frightened by content in some G-Rated movies. These immediate fear effects apply to both fictional content, such as movies and shows, as well as non-fiction content such as news broadcasts. In fact, in a survey 37% of parents reported their child immediately expressing fear after watching the news, especially if the child was older.
What’s so bad about being scared?
Less is known about the potential long-term effects of fears and phobias from the media. In a survey of 150 college-aged students, researchers found that 90% of the participants were able to give a detailed description of a movie or television show that scared them in a lasting way. Of these, 26% of the students reported still experiencing anxiety as an adult about the scary content they viewed as a child. The researchers discovered that the younger a child was when they experienced something scary in the media, the longer the fear lasted. These lasting effects are extremely important, as science shows that exposure to persistent or chronic fear can disrupt the structure of a child’s developing brain.
All of this research points to a conclusion that it is essential for parents to understand what may scare their child. More than knowing what is scary, parents and caregivers should also take an active role in their child’s media use in order to avoid scary or inappropriate content, and help their child process the media they consume. Check back in on Friday for some concrete examples and take-home tips of how to mitigate scary media exposure for your young child!