Nobody's immune to the stuff

By EMILIE LE BEAU
CHICAGO TRIBUNE
Frog-eating snakes don't scare Sophie M. During a trip to Wisconsin, she saw a 3-foot snake swallowing a frog and came to Kermit's rescue. "I picked up the snake and it dropped the frog and I threw it in the woods. I think it was mad, but I surprised it," says Sophie, 16, of Oak Park, Ill.
Snakes, bugs, heights and ghosts -- nothing really scares Sophie. "I'm the kind of person where my brothers call me to get rid of the spider," she says. "I'm not afraid of a lot of things."
Though Sophie has few fears -- "Except maybe being stranded somewhere alone" -- most kids are scared of something. Some kids are afraid of the supernatural, and are especially spooked at this time of the year, when ghostly tales abound.
Other kids have more earthly fears, such as of dogs or water. Scott W., 14, of Highland Park, Ill., says he used to be very afraid of the dark. And he found haunted houses to be too spooky. It's "the full idea of going in there and knowing people are doing their best to scare you. Knowing they are trying to scare me scares me even more," he says.
Mind over mind
Telling himself there was nothing to fear helped Scott deal with his dread. "Using a mental process helped a lot," he says. "When I was scared of the dark and thought there were monsters in my closet, I would think it was all in my head."
Personal pep talks can help kids calm their fears, says Sheila Ribordy, a psychologist at DePaul University. "Sometimes," she says, "we talk to our head to reassure ourselves: 'I'm scared right now, but I know the person behind that mask isn't Dracula.'"
Slowly confronting a fear also can help. Ribordy says kids who are afraid of water can dip their feet in the shallow end and work up to a full dip. But extremes like avoiding the pool or getting pushed in won't help tame terrors, she says.