Yeah, but it's good for kids to deal with scary--especially all-in-the-head scary, because then they learn you can be scared and keep going. That's an important lesson. Parents have to keep kids safe but allow them to face real fear and conquer it. You parents have a TOUGH JOB.

Yep. In my hometown, you drank and blew shit up until you were old enough to drive. Then you drove out to a different field to drink and blow shit up, and maybe take a baseball bat to some mailboxes on the way home for a little something different.

Drank, smoked up, and burned things. Then we drove to the river or to the shale heaps and gravel pits and drank, smoked up, and burned things. So yeah, I'd say common.

It's doesn't matter -- scary is scary!

Childhood is often terrifying!

I'm still creeped out by Bruce Springsteen singing "I'm On Fire," because when I first heard it I thought it was actually about a man sneaking into a little girl's room and something about a knife etc etc.

Childhood is often terrifying!

That's why kids need German fairytales.

and I half worry that she would stop to look at something or think about something and forget to go all the way to school.

Yes, I believe this was a major concern of my mother's. Don't think it ever actually happened though.

My dad totally blew stuff up. He made his own nitroglycerin at a shocking young age (he used to climb up on a ladder with a cap of it (!) and use an eyedropper to "bomb" toy cars.) . He filled his basement with chlorine gas, bleaching all the laundry my grandmother was drying down there. And burned down a cornfield.

But that was 50+ years ago, and he certainly didn't let us get that creative. He only let us cannibalize firecracker to blow shit up.

That's why kids need German fairytales.

My collection of the original Grimm/HCA stories is one of my cherished possessions. I got it when I was six, I think. I still pretty much live in fear, but nsm of witches and siblings.

So, this is common, then? That sounds just like where she's from.

I guess other kids didn't grow up knowing how to make bombs out of common household items, but when you live out in the middle of nowhere, you have to make your own fun.

I mean, I also read the entire local library and collected fossils?

My collection of the original Grimm/HCA stories is one of my cherished possessions. I got it when I was six, I think. I still pretty much live in fear, but nsm of witches and siblings.

Now you've done it, we're going to be inundated by the enraged cries of oppression from the sibling community.