Responding to Fear Through Killing vs. Compassion: The Crane Fly and the 3 Year Old

In 2017, my 3 year old was crying in the bathroom. She said there was crane fly in the bathroom and she was scared of it. She said she hated it and thought that it was going to hurt her. I informed her that this being was not an ‘it’ but rather, a living being. I knew they were harmless and let her know. Also, I explained to her that the insect must be really scared:

“I mean, just imagine you are lost, away from home, from your family, and this huge being is hooting and hollering about how they are scared of you and want to squish you. I mean, how terrified would you be when all you want to do is find your family and friends and be safe again?”

A few minutes later, she came to me and calmly said, “Mama, I want to help the bug find his family.” This was a very very awesome thing for her to have said, because since she was about 14 months old, she had always conveyed to me how she was scared of spiders and insects; ‘hates them’. And, for nearly 2 years I had explained to her that you can’t go around scared and hating beings just because they ‘scare you’ or ‘look funny’ when they are actually no threat to you at all. I have often said,

“It’s not the being’s problem that you have issues…and you shouldn’t try to stomp or kill the insect or spider unless they’re trying to hurt you."

It was hard for her to fully understand what I had been telling her for the last 2 years as well as put the philosophy into practice until that day.

Our family lives in a U.S. culture in which most children’s parents are telling them that if a bug or spider scares them, “Kill ‘it'”. Many of the parents at the playground I have encountered do kill the bugs and spiders their children are hooting and hollering about. Dealing with one’s fear of another being that means them no harm by “killing it”, is cruel and problematic on many levels. This method most likely does not teach children more compassionate and critical engagement with the beings they share the planet with.

How does this rhetoric infiltrate how they engage with human beings they fear who mean them no harm?(i.e., cisgender kids who ‘fear’ transgender and non-binary children, due to learning this fear rhetoric in a cis-sexist society? Their response may be to bully and harass these children they are taught to fear.)

Also, I have observed that it is mostly girls in the USA who have been taught to be scared of insects and arachnids as well as to not find anything worth learning about these beings. I’d even argue that this has been one of many ways to socialize cisgender girls into “proper” girlhood (whereas cisgender boys are socialized to not be scared of these little beings and/or expected to be ‘brave’ enough to kill them to impress girls or ‘save’ girls from these little creatures = “proper” boyhood).

I have been teaching my 3 year old (and other 3 kids) ways to interact with insects and spiders that my father also taught me when I was a little girl (I talk about this in my contributed chapter in Sister Species). 

One day, I was about 9 years old. I had been hooting and hollering about a spider that I wanted kill because I was scared of the little creature. My father told me it wasn’t the spider’s problem that I was scared of them and that killing the spider as a solution to my issues was not going to solve the root of my problem: my fear and ignorance.

My father had tried to teach me this concept for years, but for some reason, it resonated with me and it was an ‘a-ha’ moment at the age of 9. It was also the same year he became upset and distressed when he saw me deeply cutting into a tree in our yard, to peel its layers of bark off. He said something like,

“What is wrong with you? That’s like peeling the skin off of you while you are alive. Would you like that?”

The tree survived and is still in my parent's yard with a deep scar– and I still feel like a fool and ashamed for having done something so ignorant and unmindful, whenever I see that scar, decades later.

So, I was very excited that my 3 year old finally had an 'ah-ha' moment and realized that this being should not be squished but that she should try to help them as much as she can.

As an adult, I still practice being aware of knee-jerk reactions to people, non-human animals, and other situations:

• Am I responding in fear and ignorance?
• Why am I reacting this way and how can I respond compassionately with non-violence?
• How have preemptive strikes/attacks against marginalized human beings become normalized in U.S. culture, blaming the victim for being scary? (Check out the book Conflict is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair by Sarah Schulman.)

I continue to explore fear, trauma, and ignorance in my own DEI consulting work and fiction writing.