Last night, my 10-year-old daughter Vlada came into our room and lay down next to us on our parents’ bed. She whispered in my ear: “Dad, I can’t sleep, I’m scared.” “What happened that scared you?” - I asked. “I was watching TikTok in the evening and a very scary monster flashed there, and I remembered the word “skinwalkers.” They live in the forest and kill people, and also scream loudly for help, luring their victims, she explained. - I didn’t look any further, and now he’s standing before my eyes and I can’t sleep. “Well, let’s deal with your monster,” I said sleepily and took out a tablet to go online in search of these skinwalkers. Why did I go online in 2am? Why didn’t you take your daughter, sit with her, or ask your wife about it? Because here’s why: A monster has come, which means it’s time to get acquainted! The fact is that at the dawn of its appearance, fear had not yet gone deep into the child’s psyche, nor had it taken root and metastasized there in the form of accompanying images that intersected with reality and complemented each other, or not was pushed into the depths of the unconscious, where, having lost its outline, it would turn into a cloudy, indistinct image, each time awakening anxiety with the approach of darkness. A child, left alone with his new fear, inevitably adapts to it, using the methods available to him: he may repress it, with great difficulty avoiding frightening thoughts, he will find a way to somehow distract himself, or he will suffer until drowsiness wins. All this can be experienced by him with great stress and the realization that he will have to be alone with his difficulties. With your help and support, without running away, he will be able to safely look straight into the depths of his fear, discern it, and if the image is real, then neutralize it and give it a place in his world, and if it is unreal, then deal with it “here and now.” , bleed and devastate, leaving him an empty husk. You still lead your child by the hand in every sense, and not just on a walk - always remember this. There are a lot of unknown variables in the world and how he will manage them depends on your participation: face them and perceive them rationally or avoid them, expecting danger from everything unknown (hello, basic security, which is then so difficult to get in an adult age).And so, we type the word “skinwalkers” in Yandex, plunging into the mysterious world of teenage cryptids and horrors. According to modern legends, a Skinwalker is a creature of a mutant mystical nature who is simply trying to drive a random traveler crazy, or traumatize his psyche with his deformity. Some of the witnesses stated that this cryptid climbed into their houses and sat by their bed. Here we need to make a small but important note: in such cases, you must, firstly, be careful when asking search queries, and not immediately show results for them ( you never know what kind of nasty things the search engine throws at you), and, secondly, you need to go to the end so that it doesn’t turn out that you overload the child with even more scary pictures, but do not dispel his anxiety. To do this, before searching, it is recommended to go, for example, to the toilet or “pour some tea” and there, while the child is not looking, test queries for the safety of the contents, selecting in advance those answers that we can calmly process and chew for the child. Yes, my dear friends, this is quite a serious job and you are walking on thin ice, because this is a new variable for you to cope with. Often, by the will of parental duty, without realizing it ourselves, we become therapists for our children. And it’s good - we need to give children not only childhood traumas. We found just a bunch of terrible pictures, we had to re-read a bunch of articles. When it became clear that the topic was purely fictional and did not intersect with reality, and besides, there was no cruelty there, I began to calmly open one article after another, comprehensively expanding our understanding of the subject. We found out that skinwalkers were originally called