Newtown’s Halloween Adventure

Three times each year, Newtowners mass on or near Main Street for events that are distinctly local. Each serves a specific purpose for the town: the Labor Day Parade is an annual definition of who we are; the tree lighting in the Ram Pasture pushes back against the winter darkness with light, and song, and joy; and the newest of these traditions, the annual migration of thousands of children up and down Main Street on Halloween, reminds us that our 300-year-old town still has a youthful spirit.

No matter what our age, we all find it hard to let go of our youth on Halloween, figuratively and literally. Just look at the parents hanging back in the shadows on Halloween night. As often as not, they are wearing costumes and laughing with other parents at the spectacle they have made of themselves and, collectively, of the night. They are there, however, because the prospect of letting small children head off to fend for themselves, on Halloween or any other night, is scary. To be a parent is to be haunted by worries.

The educator and author Elizabeth Stone once observed that “making the decision to have a child — it’s momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.” There are advantages to raising children in a town like Newtown, where affluence has helped foster relative safety on our streets, opportunity in our schools, and protection from many of the modern threats that undermine the lives of children living in poverty.  But as parents discover each year on Halloween night, there is a balance that must be struck between being overly protective and ruining the experience for the children and courting disaster by being too disengaged.

Halloween in Newtown is, for us, emblematic of that tricky childrearing balance. As parents and as a community we need to foster independence in children by giving them both the opportunity and encouragement to be creative, to dress up their lives as they choose, and to experience the consequences of their choices, while standing by ready to intervene when real threats loom in the shadows. If we do it right, everyone makes it home at the end of the day a little younger at heart and a little more grown up in experience. We hope that Newtown will always be a town that strikes the right balance and remains a place where children may safely learn that life is an adventure — especially on Halloween.