25/11/2025
When Darkness Teaches the Wrong Lessons
I want to talk today to every parent who thinks, “It’s fine, they’ll get used to it,” when their child cries in the dark.
From the moment a baby is born until around the age of five, their emotional world is under construction. In those years, the brain is still wiring what safety feels like, what love feels like, and what it means to be alone or with someone. These are not “just years they won’t remember.” These are the years that sit underneath everything they become.
A very important fact: young children do not know how to separate reality from imagination. They don’t have the mental tools yet. If they are scared, their brain will create a story to explain the fear. Shadows become creatures. Silence becomes danger. An empty room becomes “something” watching them. To us this is imaginary. To them, it is very real.
When a child wakes up at night and finds no one there, they don’t think, “Mama probably went out for a bit.” They think on a body level: “I’m alone. I’m not safe. Something is wrong.” Their nervous system goes into panic. The heart races. The muscles tighten. Their brain has to do something with all of that fear. So it starts to build pictures, scenes, characters, demons, angels, anything that will make the chaos make sense.
This is how fear becomes a teacher.
Fear teaches the child: I am alone. I must protect myself. The world is not reliable. What I feel is too big and I have to escape it. Sometimes that “escape” is fantasy and imagination. Sometimes it’s leaving the body mentally and disconnecting.
Fast forward twenty or thirty years, and this same child is now an adult who might struggle with anxiety, overthinking, distrust, or a constant need to escape reality. They may have a rich inner world, but it’s not always a creative safe place. It can be a place where they hide when life feels overwhelming. They might go into daydreams, numbing, addictions, or relationships that are not grounded. They can have trouble staying present, because presence as a child felt terrifying.
This is not drama. This is how early experiences wire the nervous system.
Let’s talk about what children between 0 and 5 actually need.
They need presence more than independence. At that age, independence is not built by leaving them to handle fear alone. Independence is built slowly, on top of thousands of moments where they felt safe with someone by their side.
They need co-regulation. A newborn, a toddler, even a four-year-old cannot self-regulate emotionally. Their brain literally borrows your calm. When you come when they cry, hold them, speak softly, breathe slowly, their nervous system learns how to come back down from a state of alarm. Over time, this becomes their internal template for calming themselves as adults.
They need predictability. When you respond consistently, their body learns: “Someone comes back for me. I matter. I am not forgotten.” This is the base of healthy attachment, of trusting partners later in life, of feeling that the world is not out to get them.
Now let’s be very clear about what is not okay.
Leaving a small child alone in a dark room while you go out “because they’re already asleep.”
Letting them cry it out in pure panic with no one returning, no touch, no voice.
Laughing at their fears or telling them they are being dramatic, crazy, or silly.
Using the dark as a way to scare them into obedience.
All of these may look small in the moment. But in the body of that child, they are big. The message is: your fear is your problem. Your feelings are too much. No one is coming.
When this message repeats often enough, the child learns to leave themselves too. To ignore their own fear, to disconnect from their own body, to live in their head, or to build a fantasy world that feels safer than the real one. That’s where we start to see adults who are physically present but emotionally far away, or adults who constantly feel like something bad is about to happen even when everything is fine.
So what can we do instead?
We show up, especially at night. If they wake up and call you, go. Sit with them. Hold their hand. Let them see your face and feel your body there. You’re not “spoiling” them. You are wiring their nervous system for safety.
We name the fear. You can say, “You woke up and it was dark. That felt scary. I’m here now.” Simple, grounded words. No shame, no minimising.
We explain the dark gently. “The dark is the same room with less light. Your toys are still here, your bed is still here, and I am still close.” Even before they understand every word, your tone and repetition will build meaning.
We protect their imagination. A child’s imagination is powerful. It can build peaceful stories of comfort, or terrifying stories of threat. Your job as a parent is not to kill their imagination; it’s to anchor it. You are the bridge between their inner world and the real world.
We stop using fear as a parenting tool. Fear will get you obedience, yes. But it will cost the child their inner safety. And that price shows up later in ways that are much heavier than a bedtime battle.
Children do not need perfect parents. They need present ones. They need adults who understand that these early years are not just about getting them to sleep and stop crying, but about teaching their body how safety feels.
The darkness itself is not the problem. What teaches the wrong lesson is when the child faces that darkness alone.
Because the child who had to survive the night by escaping into fantasy often grows into the adult who struggles to stay in reality. And healing, later, is about going back to that small version of themselves and finally giving them what they should have had from the beginning: someone who stays.
