Day of the Dead children's resources

February 12, 2019 12:38 PM

I have a sensitive child who saw Coco and is now terrified of the Day of the Dead. When he thinks of it he frequently starts to cry, but he can't seem to stop dwelling on it, and it's incredibly distressing for him. (He is talking to a therapist about it.) Could you suggest resources -- webpages, storybooks, products -- that might help him understand a bit better, and be less frightened of the skeletons?

It's not entirely clear why this is so distressing -- he's not bothered by minecraft skeletons, for example, and death-qua-death doesn't cause him this level of extreme and continuing upset. But he is REALLY FREAKED OUT and in the past giving him more information about something he's scared of has helped him control that fear, so I'm hoping that might work here, because it's been going on for months, and everyone -- his parents and his therapist and his classroom teacher -- is at a loss.

(Also eating sugar skulls feels like it might make him a Day of the Dead partisan!)

I'm starting from knowing the general contours of it from living in a place with a lot of Mexican immigrants and from being specifically interested in Catholic folk practices, but really not very much about the specifics.

posted by Eyebrows McGee to Society & Culture (27 answers total)

This is sort of sideways, and I don't know if he's a good age for it, but there's an adventure game set in a Day-of-the-Dead esthetic: Grim Fandango. I haven't played it, but I've had it recommended to me as super clever and fun. If playing video games together is a thing you do at all, do you think it might be a thing that would be desensitizing?

(I can also see ways that this could be a terrible idea, but you know him, so you should be able to guess if it might be productive.)
posted by LizardBreath at 12:51 PM on February 12, 2019

Just spitballing here, but for me the saddest and scariest thing about Coco is that forgetting your dead ancestors or being forgotten by them causes total annihilation of the "soul" that continues to exist otherwise. Perhaps it would be helpful to see if that is at the root of the anxiety and address that by talking about how you remember dead loved ones in your family and how he will be remembered? However, there's no getting around the fact that ultimately everyone is forgotten. It caused a little existential despair for me and I'm a grown-ass man, so I totally understand how it might be too much for your son.
posted by zeusianfog at 12:58 PM on February 12, 2019 [8 favorites]

Response by poster: "(I can also see ways that this could be a terrible idea, but you know him, so you should be able to guess if it might be productive.)"

Yeah, definitely like throw ideas at me and I will filter and sort. We're all at such a loss for how to help him that I am up for out-there suggestions. Even if it's not quite the right thing, maybe it'll help me find the right thing.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 12:58 PM on February 12, 2019

Grim Fandango is great-- the main character, Manny Calavera, is a travel agent (a civil servant) who helps the recently departed travel through the land of the dead to heaven, basically. He uncovers corruption in his department-- they're supposed to give faster trips (a high speed train) to people who lived for good, and slow trips ("here's your walking stick") for those who were bad, in essence, but the wealthy are buying their fast tickets, leaving the poor for the slow trips. It's possible that being able to explore (to the limited degree possible-- this isn't an open world) the Land of the Dead might be helpful for your kiddo.

It's rated PEGI 12, based on its most recent release, a rating which is summarized as such:
> Video games that show violence of a slightly more graphic nature towards fantasy characters or non-realistic violence towards human-like characters would fall in this age category. Sexual innuendo or sexual posturing can be present, while any bad language in this category must be mild. Gambling as it is normally carried out in real life in casinos or gambling halls can also be present (e.g. card games that in real life would be played for money).

I'd say 12-14 is about right for the minimum skill level, but if he's younger, and you're playing with him, well, I assume you're older than 14. Trailer for the remastered version here. The game does spend a bit of time in a kind of land of vice within the land of the dead.

Youtube also has plenty of walkthroughs-- the game is 20 years old, after all, so you could try watching the game.
posted by Sunburnt at 1:06 PM on February 12, 2019 [1 favorite]

Since you're saying to throw any ideas, here goes.

My daughter was TERRIFIED of owls and any depictions of owls for the longest time (like she knew which books had an owl on page 15), but she got over it completely and instantly when she saw a cute burrowing owl at the zoo. Is there such a thing as a cute skeleton that might help him? This also seems similar to the sugar skull idea. Amazon has lots of molds, including ice cube trays . Maybe you could watch them melt?
posted by FencingGal at 1:13 PM on February 12, 2019 [1 favorite]

Depending on the age, the creep factor for my sensitive 5yo (who was 4 when he saw it) was the skeletons' bones sometimes falling off or getting pulled off and used as tools and, especially, when one's eyeballs popped out and rolled around in his mouth. It wasn't the deeper, bigger nuanced story that affected him. It was these body-is-malleable visual props that disconcerted him the most.

A friend of mine's son was very bothered when he got a loose tooth for the first time. The whole idea of his body being "broken" and pieces falling out was very disconcerting to him. I wonder if this is similar.

So, I guess I don't have a resource for you other than another perspective of what might possibly be bothering your child.
posted by jillithd at 1:15 PM on February 12, 2019 [8 favorites]

Is it specifically the appearance of the skeleton-people that is causing him distress?

If so, maybe watching a YouTube "Day of the Dead" makeup tutorial would help? He can start by seeing it is a "normal" (alive) person and they gradually transform by the use of stage makeup. (unless he's specifically afraid of the 'actually dead' skeletons and is not afraid of Coco's Miguel when he's disguised in makeup as a skeleton, I know kids can have weird guidelines for what is/is not scary in fictional worlds).

While I adore Grim Fandango, it is a film noir/Casablanca world with some scary, high-tension cut scenes (towards the end, a magical train full of unworthy skeleton-people careens off the rails and dives into a portal of fire, it is implied they went to Hell for trying to cheat their way into paradise), and a lot of the humor is based in references that are probably lost on the younger set. Some characters permanently die via "sprouting," getting shot by a special gun that fires flower seeds at them which immediately take root and totally cover them in vines and flowers. Your child may find this reassuring and protective? (there's a way to 'kill' the scary skeletons!) or he may find it horrific.
posted by castlebravo at 1:15 PM on February 12, 2019 [3 favorites]

(Grim Fandango is a great game, but I could definitely see it being scary for someone who finds Coco scary. Among other things, in later levels there is actual death (I mean, post-death death - characters murder each other with some kind of gun that makes a plant grow inside their skeletons and... I don't remember the details).)

How old is he?
posted by trig at 1:16 PM on February 12, 2019

(jinx, castlebravo)
posted by trig at 1:17 PM on February 12, 2019

Is it the skeletons per se or the fact that the protagonist gets whisked off to/trapped in the Land of the Dead? When my sensitive kid was in early grade school, movies about being trapped were horrid for her -- things like Tim Allen getting turned into a dog, for instance, in the supposedly fun movie The Shaggy Dog. Cute dogs or explaining that it was fiction didn't help. The only thing that worked was honoring her imagination and making signs together that said things like NO TURNING INTO DOGS CAN HAPPEN HERE and taping them in her room.
SO if you can find out what part of the plot involving skeletons scared him maybe you can deal with that, not with the skeletons. Like making signs together that say "EYEBROWS JR CANNOT GO TO THE LAND OF THE DEAD." Or "NO DAY OF THE DEAD SKELETONS CAN COME HERE." Obviously the kid picks the wording -- that is just supposed to be a childlike example.
Good luck, it takes detective work at that age...
posted by nantucket at 1:22 PM on February 12, 2019 [7 favorites]

Maybe try a book like Uncle Monarch and the Day of the Dead? It focuses on butterflies and the reviews state that it teaches that Day of the Dead doesn't just focus on skeletons. You could see if your library could order it, as it seems kind of pricey ($28).

All good reviews and maybe look at the monarchs, because they are significant (and hopefully he likes butterflies).
posted by Marie Mon Dieu at 1:28 PM on February 12, 2019 [1 favorite]

A comparative-religion thing might help here, unless you think it'll end up debunking whatever god(s) your family believes in. Maybe make a little chart about what each religion believes about the afterlife, and what your child thinks happens. (Mine decided to believe in reincarnation till science figures out how to evade death.)
posted by xo at 1:36 PM on February 12, 2019 [1 favorite]

(For what it's worth, you don't eat sugar skulls. They're usually either decoration or an offering.)
posted by fiercecupcake at 1:38 PM on February 12, 2019 [3 favorites]

Also - if he only saw the film the one time, maybe watching it again with a parent to talk him through it? And giving him the DVD controller so he can control when the film starts and stops, letting him 'pause it' as many times as he wants? Some of his fears maybe are getting blown up and distorted by his kid-memory of a film he only saw once, months ago, and seeing the film again might put them in check. Or maybe reading him a picture book based on the movie. My thinking here is it lets him get more familiar with the plot and get to know the characters and the jokes instead of his initial impression of AAH SCARY SKELETONS overriding everything else about the story.
posted by castlebravo at 1:38 PM on February 12, 2019 [1 favorite]

This is lateral but I read Raina Telgemeier's book Ghosts which is a different look at the same holiday and has a fearful kid in it. Might be worth looking to see if it's an approach that might work for your kid?
posted by jessamyn at 1:42 PM on February 12, 2019 [2 favorites]

I'm totally in your kid's camp - all my friends were so CHARMED by that movie; it was so ARTISTIC. I couldn't watch the whole thing, myself. Knowing more would not have made it more palatable.

But when I was a kid I discovered something, a way to handle painful and scary things (I had no adults who could help). Pushing away, avoiding, made it worse. But taking a tiny bit, and going over and over and over it, after awhile the bit lost its sting. I know that in theory this is Not Good: numbing, and burying and disassociating. But it can work. In your case, maybe get some stills or screen shots of what's awful, and then scribble over them COMPLETELY with black crayon or marker. Over and over. Or shred them tiny and put in garbage. Or burn them in your barbeque. Whatever.

This is a temporary solution. When he's older you might want to bring it up, and talk about it. Whatever the problem is, it's an incredibly valuable insight into himself -- once he's old enough to deal with it. It's obviously too much now. Good luck to you, and your very interesting kid!

BTW, Mr K (whose mother introduced him to Scientology at a very young age) says what I invented out of my own pain is exactly what "getting clear" is: go over and over something until you don't have a reaction to it.
posted by kestralwing at 2:06 PM on February 12, 2019 [2 favorites]

Re-focusing Day of the Dead in the context of All Soul's Day devotions might be useful here - praying for the departed is one of the spiritual works of mercy. This could be as simple as setting aside a few minutes on November 1 to remember our loved ones. Praying the Rosary in a cemetery is also common, weather (and attention-span) permitting. This might de-fang the whole thing a bit: this is a real holiday*, different cultures observe it different ways, and so on.

* - for Catholics, anyway
posted by jquinby at 2:26 PM on February 12, 2019 [4 favorites]

The idea of our dead loved ones visiting us physically is kind of a hard one to process and could certainly be terrifying. Have you looked at any real-life footage of low-key Dia de los Muertos celebrations? Grounding the holiday with what it looks like for real might help. Using ONLY Coco and other fanciful versions of it could make it seem like a much more crazy thing than what it really is: a nice, slightly sad time to remember our family.

I'm sure I've seen celebrations of dia de los muertos on a PBS kids live-action clip. Maybe a Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood episode?
posted by sleeping bear at 2:48 PM on February 12, 2019 [1 favorite]

I'm here to give my 2¢ here. I don't know your kid, I'm not a child psychologist, I'm just a mom. But maybe something I say will help. Or not.

The thing about Coco, (and most Pixar films), is that it's really emotional. That movie is designed to elicit big, deep feelings. And the subject of death is a source of some of the biggest and deepest of human emotions for just about everybody, not just kids. That movie is about love, and loss, and letting go, and saying goodbye. Those are hard things to deal with, and that movie turns all that stuff up to eleven. It sets out to touch your heart, and it succeeds.

Your kid is having a hard time dealing with those feelings. Death is scary. Coming to terms with the fact that we're all going to die eventually is scary, and I'm not sure how to tell you to address it with your kiddo. My daughter, who is tough as nails and handles most movies like a pro, periodically goes through phases where she wakes up in the middle of the night sobbing because she starts thinking about how I'm going to die someday, and so is her dad, and so is she. And I hug her and let her cry and I calm her down, but I don't lie to her or dismiss her feelings.

I think what's happening with your kid is pretty normal. And while it's hard, it's probably not unnatural. But it probably sucks for you. If I were you, I might seek out the advice of a child psychologist. Maybe there's someone at your kiddo's school who could help?

Sorry my advice isn't more concrete. Good luck.
posted by cleverevans at 2:58 PM on February 12, 2019 [12 favorites]

Sorry for the double-dip - I neglected a couple of links which might be useful for context/ideas. Also, I erred: November 1 is All Saints Day. All Souls is the 2nd. Most of the activities for kids out there focus a bit more on the All Saints part. Even so:

All Hallows’ Eve, All Saints, and All Souls Activities (That Don’t Involve Chocolate) and
Halloween Is the ‘Holy Day’ Catholic Kids Shouldn’t Miss - has a nice bit on skeletons in Catholic imagery that might be useful, plus a great little poem
posted by jquinby at 3:17 PM on February 12, 2019

It might be helpful for him to have a Day of the Dead or Coco coloring book? Coloring would give him control over his experience of the skeletons, and having the images be still, on the page, might create a tolerable kind of exposure therapy.
posted by whimsicalnymph at 3:45 PM on February 12, 2019 [1 favorite]

My six years older sister used to drag me to almost every movie she went to ( I say 'drag', but it was an act of love without parallel in any other family we knew), and I ended up seeing The Return of Dracula just after I turned six, and had probably a hundred nightmares from that movie over at least a couple of years.

But it was one scene in particular that really bothered me: Dracula's final dissolution, where we see him from the neck up lying on his back, and first the flesh of his head and face withers away in a matter of seconds and we see the skull underneath; and then the skull decays to some kind of awful brown stuff which turns to ash and then the ash blows away in a sudden wind.

I saw that scene every night in the little antechamber of sleep which also hosts the hypnic jerk for I don't know how long, and often Dracula's face was replaced by my own face, but what broke its hold over me was that one night, I recognized the awful brown stuff as tobacco that could have come from a bunch of cigarettes, and thought 'of course it turns to ash and blows away -- they set it on fire, waited to film it until it all burned up, and then turned on a fan!'

So perhaps your son was also bothered most strongly by particular scenes in the movie, and you might be able to help him break their grip on him by identifying them, going over them together, and explicating them in terms of their themes, how they were made and their role in the overall plot.

But I would also say there's a good chance his reaction to this movie reflects difficulty in coming to terms with recent events in the family; an unexpected death might make him afraid about who could die next: him, a sibling, you, or his father. And that fear might be so threatening that he can only allow it into consciousness disguised as scenes in a movie. In that case some general reassurances about how long everybody is going to live and all the great things the family is going to do in the future might be able to lay the fears to rest without ever having to fully articulate them.
posted by jamjam at 5:42 PM on February 12, 2019

I have a kid who has done this with other similarly-innocuous media. Things I can think of not covered here:

1) One way to see bits of Coco largely defanged might be to watch some of Pixar’s Making Of videos. I haven’t seen the ones for Coco, but in the other ones I’ve watched, they show a lot of cool things about set design and wireframes and story boards and visits to places relevant to the story. Knowing that the thing was made by normal people who wanted to tell a story with big feelings might help, along with seeing small out-of-context bits of character design overlaid with boring grownup talk instead of loud music.

2) When my kid was younger, he got kind of scared of/obsessed with the idea of forgetting people and things he loved, which is of course a huge Coco theme, and one that might be a little past a kid’s vocabulary to express. In my kid’s case we put up a few pictures in his room and printed some family pictures out with space for him to write underneath. If it’d been kicked off by Coco we might have called it an offrenda (even though it really is just taped on the wall.) I wonder if such a thing would be comforting to him?

3) Coco coloring book, or sugar skull coloring pages? Static images in black and white might pull some of the intensity away.
posted by tchemgrrl at 6:01 PM on February 12, 2019 [3 favorites]

When my youngest was 5, he saw some of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and was terrified of it. He wouldn't sleep unless I sat in his room with him, which I did because I was the idiot who let him see Buffy. It actually turned into a nice little tradition for us. For years! I still do it sometimes. He's 12, and these days we usually watch Crazy Russian Hacker on YouTube.

When kids are really young I think just turning off the scary thing and doing something else is better than a deep dive into why the scary thing was scary.
posted by selfmedicating at 7:01 PM on February 12, 2019 [2 favorites]

It's not always obvious what can trigger fear like this in kids even when we know them very well. I once was scared for weeks because someone told me Bloody Mary was waiting to get me when I looked in the mirror. (Silly, I know.)There were other instances. Each time, I told myself that the fear would go away eventually. Over and over. As if it were a cold. And eventually, it would fade and finally dissipate.

What also helped was physical contact with my mother, especially at night, sometimes even being allowed to sleep in her bed. This made a lot of the scary less scary. In my case, though, this remedy was all the more effective because as a rule ours was not a huggy or touchy family.
posted by Armed Only With Hubris at 11:23 PM on February 12, 2019

I know so many sensitive kids who loved Coco so much because it made them less afraid of death and skeletons and such. Do you have a bigger kid in your life (cousin, neighbor, etc.) who loved Coco and could come over to hang out with your little guy? Sometimes kids mentoring each other can be pretty magical.
posted by desuetude at 7:37 AM on February 13, 2019

When I was a tot I was terrified of the Talosians on Star Trek. My father wanted it to be because I was a sensitive and intelligent child and perceived that they were a pack of heartless cruel sociopaths who did terrible things to people, but in fact it was because they looked way weird. They had huge pulsing brains that you could see writhing around in their heads. I was also afraid of brains, possibly because of the Talosian connection, or possibly because they're freaky and gray and wormy-looking and control our every move. And whales. Whales are flat out huge, no way around it. If they ate you, they wouldn't even notice. Later I was terminally spooked by The Exorcist because 1. Mercedes McCambridge's voice gave me the shuddering chills and 2. a. Linda Blair's head turned around like an owl's and b. she floated in the air disconcertingly while looking like she'd been run over by a semi and then rolled in road paint. Later still, I could not stop replaying in my head the scenes from The Ring and similar movies wherein the monster figure is nominally human but moves disturbingly quickly and in a nonhuman manner. That animated sequence where Samara spidercrawls up the wall of her well in, I think, the second movie? No. NONONO TO THAT. I can now do for myself what my dad did for me when I was seven and give whatever I'm terrified of lately a gloss that will make me seem sensitive and profound: "It's because we as a society have abandoned our children and we are all culpable and they are now in a very real sense 'crawling out of the wells in which we cast them.' We have abdicated our responsibilities, morally, spiritually, and in every way, and it will all end in our agonized deaths. That's what the movie means and that's why I'm bugging." But nope. Sure, the movie might be about a grand human tragedy, but that grand human tragedy is not the part of the movie that scares me. What scares me is weird sounds and things that look weird or move weird.
posted by Don Pepino at 1:18 PM on February 13, 2019 [2 favorites]