Somebody somewhere posted something which reminded me

[conuly]

of a longstanding rant I have about a pair of fictional parents.

So this is from a Bruce Coville short story about a boy who is scared of the intermittent void under the bed, and I think there's no spoilers when I say that, as this is Bruce Coville, there really *is* a void under the bed and it transports him to a creepy underworld.

That's not actually the part that bugs me.

We're told in the narration that this kid's parents, who have ONE child and THREE bedrooms (one for them, one for him, one for guests) have spent several years trying to cure his fear of the void under his bed, including punishing him for not sleeping in his bed and even attempting therapy.

At no point did they consider: allowing him to move into the guest room and turning his old bedroom into the new guest room, replacing his bed with a futon that doesn't have space under it to be scared of, putting storage drawers under his bed for the same reason.

"Kid is specifically scared of the space under this and only this bed, not any other beds" is a very solvable problem, so long as you assume the problem is the bed and not your child's behavior.

Every once in a while I think of that story, and it pisses me off all over again. Lousy parents. Presumably their son still would have ended up kidnapped and sent to the void anyway, or else there's no story, but at least his time at home could've been free of this entirely pointless conflict.

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Comments

[conuly]

It would've cost them nothing - or, at most, very little - to just sort out the situation.

I cannot imagine why fictional therapist didn't point this out to them.

[gwydion]

There are a lot of crap therapists out there still and child psychology of the '70's and '80's was particularly egregious.