Best Under Bed Monster Antidote: Farts
While the children were afraid of the monster hiding under the bed or cunningly waiting in the toilet at night, the parents tried to drive him out.
Perhaps you tried to reason with them at first. “There are no monsters, honey” is about as effective as saying, “Well, good luck, I hope you’re still alive in the morning!”
You may have been trying to make your own homemade “monster spray” to preemptively destroy monsters in dark places before bed. You may have even tried to get your child to foolishly dress up their monster to dispel their fears.
But one parent on Reddit has all of these tactics. When another parent came to write about the terrifying black-eyed female “house monster” her baby saw, user Rebal picked up the suggestion :
I don’t know how to make you feel better, but I told my child that a child’s fart is a monster’s venom. And that she farts all the time when she sleeps, so she just needs to fall asleep and fart, and she will be completely safe. We even acted it out by pretending to fart at the scary monster (me) and the farting monster. I couldn’t believe it, but it worked. We even talked about how both the monsters and the fart monster’s venom are completely fictional … but I think the invented antidote helped her gain some power over the idea of monsters.
Oh, you made us feel better, Rebala. You made us ALL feel better.