Halloween prude mom has one request this spooky season: Stop scaring my kids

If one thing brings out my inner Karen, it’s Halloween displays in shops. Australia has thoroughly embraced Halloween, and there’s no putting that genie back in the bottle.Sure, it’s good for kids to experience fear; it’s fun! Grimm’s Fairy Tales were full of dismemberment and eating of internal organs with all kinds of moral warnings for children, like, ‘Don’t trust the snarling wolf that just ate your grandmother.’These are important life lessons.But as a self-confessed, over imaginative child who was traumatised after watching Return to Oz (1985) with a creepy woman who collects other women’s heads to wear them interchangeably with her own, like a hat collection, there’s no putting the genie back in the bottle when kids get scary images in their (non-interchangeable) heads. Looking around Spotlight the other day, which was full of ghouls with glowing red eyes, zombies, the Grim Reaper, skeletons hanging from the roof with spiderwebs and spooky clowns, I politely asked the woman at the checkout if any other parents had complained about the terrifying decor.My three-year-old almost wet himself and asked me if ‘skull-e-tons’ were real, which led to a confusing and even more disturbing conversation when I tried to tell him that they were actually inside him.He had some follow-up questions, and I had to tell him he did not have a scary clown inside him as well.   “Bit scary for a three-year-old, don’t you think?” I said to the checkout woman.She narrowed her eyes as she recognized me for what I really was, a shapeshifter.Posing as a respectable 30-something mother, when I was, in fact, a Karen.

A member of the fun police.A Halloween Prude.And you know what? I’m going to own it this year.STOP SCARING MY KIDS. How about you create a dark corridor somewhere with creepy music and a sign that says ‘Enter if You Dare’ and chuck all your ghouls, werewolves and ghosts in there; that would be way more fun for teenagers anywa...