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Comment by TaupeRanger | Hacker News Reader

Stories don't prepare kids for trauma, and I don't think there's any real evidence in support of that idea. I would wager a large sum that a child who has heard scary stories is not more likely to better handle, say, the loss of an immediate family member, than a child who has only heard happy stories about unicorns, rainbows, and friendly interactions.

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Stories create plans and set expectations.

Take the "story" of "if we get separated at the mall, meet at the fountain and wait there until we all arrive."

That's a story. You can imagine how it goes.

1. Imagine getting lost. Oh no, oh dear, sweaty palms! But hey, I'm not actually lost. No need to panic. Ok, now what?

2. I should actively work to remember the path back to the fountain.

Now, when your five-year-old brain realizes you got separated from daddy, you're not FREAKING OUT you're backtracking to the fountain and thumb-twiddling.

Your turn - all you have to do is come up with an edge case ("I'm sure there are some kids that'd forget where the fountain was") and pretend that "some" is statistically more relevant than the idea that making a plan makes a positive difference.

Not commenting on whether you’re right or wrong, but that’s a bit of an apples and oranges comparison there - nearly to the point of arguing in bad faith.

A more apt comparison might be a story about urban war where the main character looses many immediate family members (and explores the grieving process against the backdrop of the war) - and how that would help a kid process the loss of an immediate family member.

Don't be afraid, they're wrong.

List a single shred of scientific evidence showing that kids who are exposed to stories with similar themes to traumatic events they experience in real life are more likely the have better outcomes. Be afraid to call someone wrong without more than just-so stories and anecdotes.

Do you have a source to claim the opposite?

Of course not. I'm simply saying that I'm very skeptical of the claim and would bet actual money that the opposite (or null result) was actually true.

You got too much time on your hands.

Please stop wasting other people's.

This is a form of McNamara's fallacy. In reality, the data you are looking for is impossible to obtain. In practice, causing traumatic events is obviously unethical. Then, even if you had a proper study, there would be so many confounding factors that basically any conclusion is worthless. For instance, listening to an e-book on the subway is obviously different than discussing your emotions and response to the book. From first principles, it seems rather intuitive that if you expose anyone to a story of a trauma and discuss possible coping mechanisms, then that person is better prepared to cope with that trauma. Of course, being exposed to the thought might be traumatic itself (a kid might come to the realization that their dog is actually going to die) but if they react so poorly to the thought, how would they have reacted to the actual event? Intuitively, much worse. I'm all for data driven decisions, but our shared human experience can be a tremendous guiding light for things that are difficult to quantify.

Exactly. If you have an intuitive and common-sense take (exposure to stories with difficult themes can help kids cope with similar things in real life) and an unintuitive contrarian take (they don't, so let the kids get blindsided), the onus is on the contrarian to "list a single shred of scientific evidence."

Sure, it would be great if everyone could offer "evidence" for every position, but that's obviously unrealistic and impractical.

It's not contrarian...there's simply no evidence either way, that's all I'm saying. For every anecdote you can come up with showing a kid doing well after hearing scary stories, I'll come up with another of a kid doing without without hearing them. That's it.

Except that's not it. We have a whole generation of adults that can't handle rejection, can't handle difficulty, need emotional support peacocks on planes... because they were taught (repeatedly told the story, a.k.a. narrative) that they were special and would always win if they felt good enough about themselves.

In other words, we told stories that specifically set them up for disillusionment and disorder. Telling stories has been the way one generation prepares the next since the telling of stories began.

Oral tradition, religious texts, myth, legend, fables, fairy tales... all of these had purposes beyond entertainment. Don't go in the woods by yourself, it's dangerous. Don't swim in that river, it's dangerous. Don't be mean to other people, because you don't want to live in that society. Don't lie, because people won't believe you when you need them to.

We've always told these kinds of stories... until recently. The kids that did get these kinds of stories built the modern world. The kinds of kids that aren't getting these kinds of stories are the ones going on shooting sprees or rioting because they didn't get that raise or someone was mean to them on social media.

We do have evidence, it just isn't organized into a formal longitudinal study for you. Here's the thing. It is possible for people to discuss an idea and even draw conclusions of efficacy without a longitudinal study.

Thank you.

That is a more apt response than I could muster and encapsulates my thoughts on the matter.

I feel like everywhere today we are beset with scientism. As if defending your own position is unnecessary as long as you can call into question the rigor of your opponent's. History has taught us well the value of myth

> It's not contrarian...there's simply no evidence either way, that's all I'm saying. For every anecdote...

This isn't dueling anecdotes, it is the application of common sense and reason. You're taking a contrarian position against that, and lack of evidence (if that is indeed the case) doesn't create an "anything goes" situation where that take is on even footing with what you're arguing against.

Eh, in psychology the default is "nothing ever happens ever". No one ever changes, no effect lasts, and nothing ever replicates. There are all sorts of "intuitive" results which utterly fail to replicate, so I'd be surprised if things are better when you can't do a real study even in principle. I suppose I might just be jaded from the replication crisis, but my expectation is that things mostly just kind of happen. It's why I left for the gentle shores of math, where things work exactly as much as any pure math can be said to work.

What you call "intuitive" I call "not at all obvious or even remotely expected". There's simply no evidence either way that can't be contradicted by opposing anecdotes. That's really all I'm saying. It's not related to The McNamara Fallacy at all, because there's no obvious observation that supports the initial notion. It simply isn't common sense, even if you want it to be.

I think you can prove his point to a degree if you take the dog example. Specifically when said child doesn't already own a dog.

They could use the knowledge to either not get into the situation entirely or to embrace the situation regardless.

The former will always result in less trauma over time. Unless I am missing something. The latter is open to debate.

Thinking like this is regards to past relationships, I have prevented a lot of self trauma through experience with trauma.

Your assertion is that reading or hearing about life experiences does not prepare a person for a similar life experience.

This is absurd on its face. I'm sorry I don't have a journal article to substantiate my claim.

Pretty obvious strawman. I'm saying I'm skeptical that kids who've been told scary stories actually handle real-life trauma better than kids who weren't told scary stories.

I don't know how much scientific is the references on this article [1], but it's a good read about the topic

[1] - http://web.archive.org/web/20190423155359/https://medium.com...

I don't know if there are any controlled studies, but there's plenty of informal evidence that naive people cope poorly with traumatic events. Resilience is a product (though admittedly not a guaranteed product) of experience.

Life experience, yes. Scary stories told to children...that's what I'm very skeptical of.

The story in full will contain pieces of information that would help a child avoid said trauma entirely.

Don't go into the random abandoned house alone.

I'm actually with you on this. I've been reading articles about the trauma the war and displacement are causing Ukrainian children. I remember one mentioning older kids who knew about war already (because of stories or TV) had practically the same behavioral symptoms as younger kids who didn't understand what was happening. And this came from psychologists assessing hundreds if not thousands of kids.

Unapologetically, no

Stories definitely do help kids and adults process trauma.

I'm not going to go searching for it because you can cherry pick anything off the internet, but it's well documented that scary stories in a safe space assist children with processing traumatic events.

It's not well documented. It is simply assumed by adults who likely don't know whether it's true or not.

I see that you are talking about exposure to negative stimuli (bad stories) having no demonstrable positive impact to individuals. Perhaps this helps: Psychology has examined the impact of lots of praise (the absence of negative stimuli - e.g not allowing criticism of others, getting a 14th place ribbon) on an individual, vs those that are given critical feedback (negative stimuli is provided and/or no positive stimuli is provided e.g no ribbon or “good job” for 14th place; being excluded from the running team due to poor performance etc) for at least the past 30 years. The overall conclusion of this research is that lots of praise is a problem, and fosters the development of narcissism and leads to poor outcomes when the individual experiences “real” results (e.g they got a high five for getting a “c grade” in high school, but in their workplace performance review they get a “meets expectations” and a verbal warning from their boss that if they don’t improve they will be put on a Performance Improvement Plan).

Lots of this research can be read if you look for the impact of developing high self-esteem in individuals (typically this is done as described above), and measuring the impact of these actions.

Example paper here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1111/1529-1006.0143...

I was generally chasing the thought that reading to your kids is always good for them. Even scary stories, as long as they are don't cause too much anxiety.

By trauma I was not implying "the worst thing that can happen to a person" - just bad things in general which will happen anyway. From my personal experience strategies and coping mechanisms inspired by stories may provide true insights and help in formulating actionable strategies in novel situations. But I can't prove it as other pointed out.

My intent was not to claim terrifying stories will inoculate a person from terror, despair, loss or anguish.

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