bedtime fears

Melisandre, the red priestess from Game of Thrones, summed it up well when she declared, “The night is dark and full of terrors.” For our kids, this is less a rhetorical flourish than it is a statement of fact. One study of Australian eight- to sixteen-year-olds found that 64% of them experienced fear around night-time, a figure that rose to 73% for girls. For toddlers and preschool-aged children, some anxiety around night-time is almost inevitable.

“Age two is when you first start seeing these fears manifest,” says Kimberley O’Brien, principal psychologist at Sydney’s Quirky Kid clinic. “Separation anxiety is at its peak around then, and it also coincides with the development of a child’s imagination and powers of visual association.” Hence how shadows