Project: Monsterapy wants to help kids overcome their fears in a joyful and educational way
Starting point: Fears and nightmares are an everyday issue for most kids and their parents.
Kids’ boundless imagination can transform doors, the insides of their closets or the space underneath their beds into worlds where terrible monsters, witches, animals and all sorts of creatures live.
Challenge: I wanted to develop a tool that helps kids get over their fears in a totally different way: creative, playful, but still effective.
Target: Kids from 3 to 10 years old (and their parents)
During their early years, kids brim over with a huge amount of imagination and inventiveness. This is what makes them so special, but at the same time, it leaves them as vulnerable little people when it comes to suffering unreal fears based on their fantasies.
Insight: “My son was afraid that a monster would appear every time we turned off the light when he went to bed… We tried to explain to him that there was no need to be scared, that the monster didn’t exist, and it was only in his head… but he just couldn’t understand.”
Experts agree that the best way to get over fear is to face it; interiorize it, accept it and above all rationalize it. But this is too complicated for children…
How can we get a child to face and rationalize his own fears?
Idea: If innocence and imagination are two of kids’ greatest qualities, why don’t we use it to defeat their fears?
Concept: Fear is an intrinsic emotion that we have as humans. And we have created a never-ending list of therapies, methods and mechanisms to overcome it. But when we try to get kids to face their fears, we often forget they are only kids, and end up using the same rules and make them go through the same processes that we do as adults.
To provide a solution to this problem as an objective, we introduce Monsterapy. A concept aimed specifically at kids, designed for them. A creative-pedagogical method so that children dare to face their fears through two of their main qualities: imagination and innocence.
Helped by an adult, kids are instructed to draw their monster. The picture is then sent to Monsterapy where the monster is made into a plush toy. The toy is sent back to the child in a locked cage together with a little manual. Following the instructions, parents and kids would be able to start the process to leave behind their fears as if it were part of a game.