It’s even worse when you’re not in time to post this comment to it!
My mother’s method for dealing with this situation when I had this problem was telling me that there were no such things as ghosts, adding the words, “They’re baloney, baloney, spumoni.”
I thought that line was hilarious and it (mostly) solved the problem.
I used to think there were monsters in my closet. Years later I realized that it was because the closet backed up against my parents bedroom. Those kind of noises can be pretty scary when you don’t know what they are.
It’s a good thing I’m not a parent. I guarantee that the kid would be a lot more traumatized by waking me up at 2 am than by any sort of scary monsters. My kids would just have to hide all night.
I woke terrified one night to fluttering ghosts trying to get up my nose and in my ears. My mom came into the room with a broom and opened the window and swept all my ghosts into the night, yelling at the beasts to NEVER come back and promptly slamming the window. She was my hero!
I used the same method successfully with my own children when they had the occasional bad dream and have shared the technique with lots of other parents over the years.
When my mom was here for Christmas several years ago, I was relating to her how I’d spread her method far and wide…She looked at me and couldn’t believe that I remembered the story since I was not much more than two years old, although it seems that I didn’t have all the information.
My dad used to run a popcorn and soda concession at a national park on weekends and there were always empty bottles stored in odd places around the house. It seems that they were the perfect breeding ground for a large variety of moth that hatch out at night en-mass.
My mother’s tale is far different from the time of my remembering… She heard my screaming, walked into my room to be confronted with huge moths she initially thought were bats. Screaming in horror she grabbed a nearby broom and frantically beat the livin’ heck out of the moths and flailed the rest out the window.
She said she would have stayed around to comfort me, but she had to go calm herself down with a bottle of adult beverage.
Apparently, folks had to do without their popcorn fix for the next couple weekends, 'cause dad was busy building a new shed to house the empty bottles in.
When my son was afraid at night we got him an especially fierce looking dinosaur stuffed animal to be his protector. That seemed to work.
Oh, and John Rosemond is a douche.
Set up a camera to catch the monsters in the act. Tell your son that that he’s going to help catch the buggers. Get him some of the kids spy gear, and second the melatonin suggestion. Then review a couple of the tapes to see what’s really going on. Sleeping on the floor is weird. It usually works the other way around.
That’s a hysterical story, bare!
My advice: don’t listen to John Rosamond on most things. He has a few good ideas about instilling responsibility but on most issues like this he is a heartless bastard. All kids go through stages of one variety or another and you aren’t going to scar them for life by indulging them to some extent. Let the kid sleep on the floor. Who cares? My brothers spent most of their pre-adolescent years sleeping on a bare concrete floor covered by linoleum in their basement bedroom, right next to their beds. Why on earth? Who knows. But they did.
My own son has his bad dreams dispelled by an Actual Authentic Dreamcatcher. We hung it on a lamp near the bed and he really believes it catches his bad dreams. The mesh breaks them up, ya see. He did confess one time that it’s not 100 percent effective, but it does work really well. I reminded him he’s got Daddy and me to protect him the other times.
Febreeze makes an excellent monster spray.
The anti Monster Spray was a big hit, as was the Monster detector app. Of course, at night he still wanted his animal bed, and we had a couple of his more reliable and fierce animals guarding the doors. Because, even though there were no monsters NOW, they’d come out later to wake him up. Apparently, he also requires a special sleeping hat, which is a pair of his pajama pants that he stylishly wears on his head.
I have to document this stuff for when he’s an annoying teen.
Honestly, at this point I feel it’s less a matter of where he sleeps, and more of A) letting me sleep through the night and B) not having him terrorized every night by imaginary monsters. It’s actually a little creepy to hear him talk about the monsters coming into his room, and looking at the teddy bear guarding the door, smiling. I was waiting for a Twilight Zone moment…
Alpha Twit’s idea is a great way to kill the kid’s imagination. Cause the kid’s problem is not monsters or lying or manipulating but an overacting imagination.
To paraphrase, kids already have the dragon in their heads. You need to give them a St. George to vanquish it. Some great ideas in this thread to teach him to be the master of his imagination.
I bet if you crush it like Alpha Twit has he’ll not have control of it until he’s forty. I wonder if that’s why some teens/adults are deathly afraid of horror movies and some not so much - the ones that aren’t, have been taught their imagination is a good thing, and also taught how to control it.
That or he becomes an accountant. 
If you can find it, this book is a great help: http://www.amazon.com/Brave-Little-Monster-Ken-Baker/dp/0060286989/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1341849572&sr=8-1&keywords=the+brave+little+monster
Also, if he hasn’t seen “Monster’s Inc.” now is the time.
At our house, we use monsters as a chance to practice our confrontation skills. If there’s a monster in the closet, we first ask it “Are you a good monster or a bad monster?” (inspired by Glinda of the Wizard of Oz, of course.) If a good monster, then Celtling may ask for permission to have a sleepover with it, to which I say “yes” only if this is a night when we’d have another kid over. (Weekend night, no big plans in the am.)
If not, we politely tell the good monster that it’s too late for company and they’ll have to come back to play tomorrow.
If a bad monster, then it’s made clear that no bad monsters are allowed in our house and they’ll have to leave immediately. Int he beginning I scripted this for Celtling and encouraged her to reepeat the phrases on her own. 90% of the time now, Celtling puts this into place without my involvement. (Too funny to hear it from the next room “My Mommy does not allow bad monsters in this house. Now go home!!!”)
Occasionally I still get called in for moral support, but I almost never do the confronting for her. When she was younger, I often did though, and you probably should at first.
You’ve got a prime teaching moment in your hands here, don’t let it slip. The last thing we want to teach our kids is that they should creatively adapt themselves to the presence of bad/scary influences. Teach your child to confront fears and refuse to be ruled by them. But by no means leave him alone with fear, he needs to know you’ll have his back no matter what.
take photos so you have a wide selection for high school graduation invitations.
Just a touch of whiskey in some warm milk gives a kid an excellent monster protection aura.
Or benadryl.
When my kids were little, I told them (with great confidence) that “everyone” knows that monsters are afraid of clapping. Just clap your hands really loud and it scares the monsters. We would play “scare the monsters,” with daddy or me or one of their stuffed animals impersonating the monsters. Clap and the monster would shake, squeal and run away. Lots of fun.
This gave them control but also had the advantage that we could hear them clapping, so we could wander by and offer reassurance.
This is a great point. There truly are monsters in the world, and sooner or later our kids will have to deal with them. It helps if they’ve learned they can take control of their environment to some degree.
We did the Monster Spray, and it worked like a charm with our younger child. Our older child’s fears were only partially allayed by the spray; what really worked on her was removing the horrifically realistic life-sized baby doll that her grandpa had given her out of the closet and putting it in storage. She also had some problems with the Sesame Street book The Monster at the End of this Book, but we worked through that, since she LOVED the book.
Everyone has his or her own monsters, and it’s sometimes really difficult to figure out which one is bothering your child. When you use the Monster Spray or other solutions, you’re letting him know in a somewhat playful way that you’re not dismissing his fears or belittling them, but you’re also not going to let his fears run the household or your life.
But does it work on the cats? Spray bottles don’t work particularly well on the Neville kitties. They get the cat out of the place where she’s not supposed to be in the short term, but I’ve seen no evidence that it stops them from getting into those places in the long term.
I know what you mean. When my son started seeing “the black man,” that freaked me the hell out. Luckily, he’s old enough to realize that it’s a dream (or is it??).
We have occasional exorcisms for my daughter, who’s 2.5. Also, both of my kids know I won’t hesitate to put them in time out if they misbehave, so we threaten the monsters with that during the exorcism.
One thing that I’ve discovered having children is that I still have some similar fears from when I was their age. I don’t like having my hands hanging over the side of the bed, refuse to look in a mirror when it’s dark and can be occasionally very unnerved when the lights are out. It doesn’t help that I have a really active dream life and am sometimes so sleep deprived I continue to dream while I’m putting someone to bed.
When my daughter was six weeks old, I was walking her down to sleep and still dreaming that I was long dead and only a ghost in someone else’s room. I was staring at my husband and kept seeing my dream overlaying him while he slept, so it looked like someone else was sleeping there. It scared the crap out of me.
Me too. But it’s not because of monsters, I’m afraid the light or something will fall and break my arm.
It may be too late. The monsters may have already eaten the child’s soul and replaced it with evil. I suggest making some Evil Child Spray to be sure.
Not much of an actual contribution to solving the problem, since the closest case I know of being scared of monsters was Middlebro being scared of the dark and that was swiftly solved with a (very low-glow) nightlight, but at one point a friend of The Kidlet’s was having problems because he was convinced there were monsters everywhere.
The Kidlet asked my mother “are monsters real?” and Mom answered “is Snow White real?”
The Kidlet thought, went to his room, took the Snow White puppet and Snow White book to Mom and said “yes, she’s a real story and a real puppet!”
“OK, so same with monsters. They’re real, but they’re not real in the same way you and I are real.”
Works for The Kidlet.