Life is full of little fears and big ones, so who am I to tell my toddler not to be afraid of stuff, right? After all, I'm afraid of stuff, too, so what's the difference?

But my inclination is to try and make him unafraid of most things, while maintaining healthy fears of things like playing in the street and touching the hot stove. I want him to be social and sociable, but, of course, I don't want him heading toward open car doors at the promise of candy. Sometimes, as John Cale once noted, "fear is a man's best friend."

One difficult step in this delicate dance is trying to allay fears without blowing them off. He is, after all, experiencing real feelings, and I don't want him to feel foolish or ashamed of his fears. That's no way to overcome them.

Today I read a line in a novel I'm deep into that said that it's good to let kids be afraid. It lets them be little. And, although it was just an incidental line in a work of fiction, it struck a chord for me.

While I don't want my son to be afraid of everything he sees -- luckily, he isn't -- his fear can actually be interpreted as a sign of his belief that anything is possible; a sign that he's a kid with a mind open to infinite possibilities.

That scarecrow with the skeleton mask sitting on a porch up the street is scary to him because he believes it really could pose a threat. The same goes for the person in the newspaper photo wearing freaky glasses that he thinks is a little creepy. And for the Frank Lloyd Wright marionette that we have -- don't ask; although that is, admittedly, a little creepy even to me.

Because he doesn't know the limitations of what is possible, these things are potentially scary; he doesn't know that Frankie Wright Doll (that's his, and thus our, name for it now) won't come alive and attack him.

But the only way, really, for him to logically start to understand that all these things aren't really scary at all is for him to start to understand the limitations; to let his imagination deflate a little bit. However, once it does, it can be hard to re-inflate.

So, I'll continue to do my best to temper his fears and make him at ease around things he's not sure about and to not make him feel judged for his fears. But at the same time, I'll let him be a kid -- fears and all. Because once you grow up, there's no going back.