How to deal with a teenager who saw a banned film.

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Dear care and feeding,

My 11 year old daughter had a movie night for her best friend’s birthday. That was Saturday evening. I heard earlier that they would watch two films suitable for an October party: Coraline And The nightmare before Christmas. My daughter has seen both films before and wasn’t frightened by either of them. In general, she takes “scary movies” well (although I compare her to her brothers, one of whom was afraid of them Confused).

On the drive home from the birthday party, she broke down and said they had been watching Nightmare before Christmas And …

Scream. It sounds like the kids were in the basement eating pizza and cake between movies and then the parents stopped checking on the kids until it was time to go home. Since then she has behaved differently. She says the film didn’t scare her, but it was what it was Was very bloody and disturbing. She usually loves being alone in her room, but she spends as much time as possible in the living room and gets annoyed when no one else is there. She is nervous when she showers or sleeps alone. She will worry if she hasn’t seen a family member for a long time.

I’m really not sure what to do here. I sneaked into the theater to see it Scream when I was in high school, but that’s a completely different situation and I wasn’t as traumatized, for lack of a better word. My husband and I disagree about whether we should punish her further. We’re also not sure whether to talk to the hostess’s parents about this (we both agree on how much we trust her parents after this) or the parents of the other guests at the party. And I have no idea how to help my daughter.

– Still screaming

Dear Still,

First, continue to discipline her? For what? She was at a party and someone was making a scary movie, which she told you about almost immediately. You definitely shouldn’t discipline her. Her daughter was scared, she’s still a little shaken from the experience, and she doesn’t need to be punished for that.

Feel free to reach out to the other parents, too, although I think they almost certainly already know – yes, that this party is already notorious among the kids’ peers and everyone in the neighborhood. And I wouldn’t treat the birthday boy’s parents too harshly. Could they have checked more carefully which film the children were watching? Secure. But the kids were down in the basement where they belong and the parents were upstairs where they belong, and sometimes eleven-year-olds outsmart their parents. That’s how it works.

By and large, these are small potatoes. Your daughter saw a movie she wasn’t ready for, which has happened to almost every child in America since the invention of the VCR – and relatively few of those children have suffered permanent scars as a result. And during Scream is definitely too much for most 11 year olds, as you will recall from your own experience with the well-known horror classic Confused that you really never know what movie will freak out a child. (My wife slept on the floor in her little brother’s room as a girl for a year after watching a particularly scary movie The Wizard of OzTheir logic was that if the flying monkeys came, they would kidnap an easy-to-carry baby before kidnapping it themselves.)

Be kind and gentle to your little girl. Let her hang out with you in the living room. Buy her a night light and sit with her a few times when you go to bed. I assure you that within a week or two—or maybe a little longer if she’s like my wife—she’ll feel better and this event will become a crucial, vividly remembered part of her own story about the creation of pop culture becomes.

-Dan