My daughter was fine with the dark for three years. Then one night, out of nowhere, she stood in her bedroom doorway in her pajamas and announced “there’s a monster in my closet,” and bedtime has never been the same since.

She’s three. Nothing scary happened — no scary movie, no loud thunderstorm, nothing I could point to. One day the dark was fine, the next day it was full of monsters. I asked her what the monster looked like and she said “it’s fluffy and it has big teeth,” which honestly made it worse because now I was picturing it too.

The first thing I tried was logic. “Monsters aren’t real, sweetie.” I explained it three different ways. She cried harder. Of course she did — telling a scared 3-year-old that her feelings are factually incorrect is not comforting, it’s just lonely. That was my flop number one.

Flop number two: leaving the big ceiling light on. She fell asleep fine, but then she’d wake up at 2am in a fully lit room, wide awake, ready to play. Nobody slept for a week.

Here’s what actually worked, in order:

The nightlight. Not a bright one — a small warm plug-in that makes the room glow amber instead of black. Total darkness was the problem; a little light fixed most of it.

The room check. Every night, we check together. She holds the flashlight — this part is key, SHE holds it — and we look in the closet, under the bed, behind the curtains. “Any monsters?” “No.” “Good. Room’s clear.” It takes three minutes. The first week she needed it twice a night. Now it’s just part of the routine, like brushing teeth.

The monster spray. This is the silly one that actually worked. I put water and two drops of lavender in a little spray bottle, wrote “MONSTER SPRAY” on it with a marker, and told her monsters hate the smell. Before bed she spritzes it around her room herself — under the bed, in the closet, two pumps by the door. The look of pure power on her face the first time she did it… she went from victim to monster-bouncer in one evening. She even made me stand guard by the door while she did the closet, like a tiny supervisor, which I took very seriously.

She still asks for the spray sometimes, and the nightlight stays on, and every few weeks there’s a bad night where she ends up in our bed at 3am, starfished across the mattress like she pays rent. That’s fine. She’s three, the dark is big, and she’s handling it her way. I’m not trying to fix the fear — just giving her tools until she outgrows it.