A Musing: On the Original Boogie Men in a Season Rife with Them

Some thoughts on the widespread tradition of inducing fear in children (and others)

AT TIMES, when I’ve been on a stroll through the neighborhood, walking past a residence in another part of town, or wandering the aisles of a store, I’ve seen or heard a child bawling or repeatedly whining or otherwise begging to express something to an adult, all without avail. These kids don’t get asked about their experience or intentions, what they’re seeking to communicate; instead, their “output” tends to get punished, argued with, threatened, discounted, or simply cold-shouldered.

Aside from the fact that parenting doesn’t come with a manual, it seems that, especially behind closed doors, so many families are structured as “little tyrannies,” hierarchical enclaves within our so-called democracy which hardly serve as exemplars of that democracy. Even the most benign of these “tyrannies” seek from the children within them a measure of compliance to the will and arbitrary preferences of the parents or elders in the hierarchy.

Yet, in order to lead by example, it stands to reason that one cannot use force, deception (dishonesty, lies), or stony silence to gain behavioral compliance and meet an agenda. (Isn’t having an agenda that depends on another’s behavior suspect in the first place?) “Good behavior,” a vaguely limned inconstant, is the standard parental objective—behavior that essentially equates to compliance, obedience, and a distinct lack of challenges to the status quo.

Fear, dread, and terror are the tools typically brought to bear to gain such compliance, not only because they are readily at hand through physical or emotional force, but because they are expedient in method—if one does not look too far down the timeline at their result.

These abstractly driven states (of fear, dread, and terror) lend themselves easily, and most unfairly, to the particular imagination, naïveté, trustingness, and lack of life experience of the young (that is, on their inability to check facts). Often these “desired” states are embodied as terrible men—boogie men—who will do unthinkable things to inherently vulnerable children, like putting them in sacks, stealing them away from their families, or eating them. Not to mention intimidating them.

Wikipedia characterizes a boogie man (one of several variant spellings for the term) as “a type of mythical creature used by adults to frighten children into good behavior.” Merriam-Webster’s take is that a boogie man is “a monstrous imaginary figure used in threatening children.” Amazingly (or not?), this type of monstrous character, meant to bring the young into line through fear and dread, is almost universal across human culture—it exists in dozens upon dozens of cultures across the world, in fact—and from time immemorial.

I am reminded of all the books of fairytales I read in my grade-school years, the pulp fiction of childhood, enticed by their fetching covers, with story after story posing awful threats to the child protagonists and facing them with unsavory horrors intended to counter their innocent disobedience, waywardness, and curiosity.

I wonder, is it not conspicuously immoral for those in a superior position of knowledge, position, or power to wield fear to exact compliance from those who are at a known disadvantage? Doesn’t the method—the use of force and threat—convert its very wielders—those who hope to inspire fear—into boogie men themselves?

While the artifice of “good behavior” (fear-induced compliance) tends to carry itself forward through self-reinforcement, it also tends to fix in place the dysfunctionality of its method, and to visit the same upon future generations.