My Three-Year-Old Was Afraid of Monsters. So I Put Her in a Book Full of Them.

My daughter Aurelia is three.

For a while, monsters were scary. Not one particular monster. Just monsters as a category. The sort that might be in a dark room, behind something, under something, or wherever else a three-year-old's imagination decides monsters are likely to conduct their business.

So I did something that may sound slightly backward. I made her a book full of them.

She was the main character. The monsters were still monsters — they looked strange, lived in strange places, some were enormous. But they were not particularly good at being frightening. Some needed help. Some were silly. Some became friends. The scary thing became something Aurelia could walk toward, talk to, laugh at, and eventually have an adventure with.

I made more than one of these books. Now she loves monsters.

I cannot tell you the books caused that. Three-year-olds change quickly. Fears appear and disappear. Children get older and decide that yesterday's terrifying creature is today's favorite toy for reasons known only to them.

But watching the change made me interested in something broader: a story does not always have to remove the frightening thing. Sometimes it can change the child's relationship to it.

The monster can stay

There is an understandable instinct, when a child is afraid of something, to make it disappear. There is no monster. The dark is not scary. Nothing is under the bed. Everything is fine.

Sometimes that reassurance is exactly what a child needs. But stories have another option.

The monster can stay. It can even be enormous. The difference is that now the child gets to meet it somewhere they have a little more control. On a page, you can close the book. You can go backward. You can ask what happens next. You can stare at the monster for five minutes and point out that its shoes are ridiculous.

And most importantly, the child in the story can do things the child listening to the story might not yet know how to do. They can investigate, ask questions, run away and come back, get help, discover that the monster is frightened too — or find out that the terrible noise in the cave is coming from a creature with a cold who cannot stop sneezing.

The frightening thing has not vanished. It has become manageable.

Fear is more interesting when the child gets some agency

A story about bravery does not need a fearless hero. In fact, fearless heroes are not especially useful if the problem is fear. If Aurelia walks into a monster castle and announces that nothing frightens her, there is not much for the story to do.

But if she stops at the gate? If she hears something enormous moving inside? If she considers going home?

Now there is a choice. She can take one more step — by herself, or by asking someone to come with her. Maybe she finds a clue that makes the monster slightly less mysterious. Maybe she is still scared when she opens the door.

That is much closer to what courage actually looks like. The goal does not have to be I am no longer afraid. It can simply be I was afraid, and I figured out what to do next. That is a more useful story.

A personalized story can use the child's actual fear

This is where making the story for one particular child becomes useful. “Afraid of monsters” can mean several different things. One child is afraid of something hiding in their bedroom. Another doesn't like large creatures. Another saw something in a movie and has been thinking about it ever since. Another is fine with monsters during the day and deeply suspicious of them after the lights go out.

Those do not necessarily need the same story. Neither do the children.

A cautious child might slowly investigate. A bold child might charge directly toward the monster and discover that bravery without thinking creates an entirely different problem. A child who loves animals might find that the monster behaves more like a strange animal than a villain. A child who loves jokes might defeat the scary atmosphere by discovering that monsters are extraordinarily easy to make laugh.

The details of the fear matter. So do the details of the child.

Making monsters ridiculous helps

A monster can look intimidating and still have a problem that is objectively silly. Maybe it is afraid of frogs. Maybe it has six feet and cannot tie any of its shoes. Maybe everyone thinks the terrible roaring from the mountain means an ancient beast has awakened, when really the monster has hiccups. Maybe the monster under the bed is hiding there because it is afraid of children.

The monster does not have to become harmless in every way. It just needs another dimension.

Humor changes the emotional geometry of the scene. Something that can make you laugh has a harder time remaining purely frightening. For younger children, illustration style can help with this too. Big eyes, exaggerated expressions, and absurd proportions can preserve the idea of a monster while changing the emotional signal around it. It is still huge. It just also appears to be wearing a hat much too small for its head.

You can see this at work in several of the PageCub sample books — dragons and large creatures that read as playful rather than threatening, depending on the illustration style chosen.

Sometimes understanding the monster works better than defeating it

A lot of stories about frightening things end with the frightening thing being beaten. That is certainly an option. But it is not the only one.

Maybe the monster is lonely. Maybe it is protecting something. Maybe it is making a terrible sound because it is hurt. Maybe everyone has misunderstood it. Maybe it really was behaving badly and needs to learn something too.

For a young child, that opens up much more interesting territory than simply “monster bad, hero wins.” The child can remain the hero without the monster becoming the enemy. The story can explore fear without quietly teaching that anything frightening must be destroyed or driven away.

Sometimes you need to escape the dragon. Sometimes the dragon needs a sandwich. Both are legitimate plots.

The child gets to rehearse the scary part

Stories are strange little simulations. A child can experience being lost without being lost. They can meet a dragon without meeting a dragon. They can start school in a book before walking through the actual classroom door.

They can hear a strange noise, feel frightened, make a decision, discover what caused it, and arrive safely at the end. Then they can do the whole thing again tomorrow night. And again the night after that.

That repetition may be part of why children sometimes become intensely attached to stories adults would be perfectly happy to read once. The child already knows what happens. That is the point. The frightening forest reliably ends at home. The monster reliably turns out to need help. For an adult, predictability can make a story less exciting. For a three-year-old, predictability can be the feature.

You can talk about the character instead

There is another advantage to putting a fear into a story. It gives everyone something else to talk about.

Instead of “Are you scared of monsters?” you can ask “Why do you think she stopped at the door?” Or: “Do you think that monster is scary? What should she do? Would you go in there?”

Children can be surprisingly thoughtful when the problem technically belongs to someone else. Of course, in a personalized book, “someone else” may have their name, their hair, their favorite boots, and their exact stuffed animal. The disguise is not particularly sophisticated. It does not need to be. The story simply creates a little distance between the child and the feeling. Sometimes that is enough to make the feeling easier to examine.

Do not turn the story into homework

There is a trap here. Once adults realize stories can carry lessons, we become dangerously tempted to make them educational. Suddenly the dragon is delivering a five-paragraph lecture about emotional regulation. Nobody asked the dragon to do this.

The story still needs to be a story. If you want a child to explore bravery, give them something worth being brave about. If the idea is asking for help, create a problem they genuinely cannot solve alone. Let the plot carry the lesson — not a monster who sits down and explains that sometimes things that initially appear frightening become less intimidating when we learn more about them. That monster would be correct. It would also be unbearable.

More on this in choosing the right lesson for a personalized story — the short version is that a lesson buried in an adventure lands differently than one announced at the end.

Monsters are only one version of this

The same basic idea can work with plenty of childhood fears: dark rooms, thunderstorms, dogs, bugs, doctors, dentists, getting a haircut, swimming, starting school, sleeping alone, being away from a parent, trying something new and being bad at it.

Not all fears should be handled the same way, and a story is obviously not a substitute for professional help when a child is experiencing serious or persistent anxiety. But for the ordinary fears that appear as children encounter a very large world for the first time, stories give parents an unusually flexible tool. The scary thing can become an adventure.

Make the fear specific

If you are creating this kind of book with PageCub, “a story about bravery” is enough to get started. But more detail makes the story better.

What is the child actually afraid of? What do they think will happen? When does it bother them most? How do they usually respond? What already makes them feel safer? What do they love enough that it could become part of the solution?

A child obsessed with dinosaurs does not necessarily need a gentle woodland metaphor for their fear. Put the problem in a dinosaur story. A child who loves princesses can face it in a castle. A child fascinated by space can discover something strange outside the airlock.

Aurelia got monsters. Quite a lot of monsters, eventually.

And then something funny happened

The monsters stopped being the thing I was trying to make less scary. They became the thing she asked for. Monster castles. Friendly monsters. Strange creatures. The category expanded dramatically.

I cannot run the counterfactual experiment where Aurelia never received those books and compare the two outcomes. Maybe she would have fallen in love with monsters anyway.

But I like what happened. Something once filed under scary eventually moved into interesting. Then into funny. Then apparently into please make me another one.

That is a pretty good journey for a monster. And it is one of the reasons PageCub exists. Not every child needs the same story about being brave. Sometimes they need a story containing the exact weird thing currently living in their imagination.

Then you let them walk toward it.