MY DAUGHTER IS AFRAID OF BUGS
My fourteen-year-old daughter Savannah is afraid of bugs.
Not mildly inconvenienced. Not “ew, gross.” Afraid. A wasp the size of a thumbnail built a starter nest on my friend Cam’s boat. One wasp, barely a nest at all, more of an architectural intention. She decided she no longer wanted to go to the beach. She loves the beach. She has loved the beach her entire life. One wasp on a boat and the beach was off the table.
A roach found its way into her room one night. She woke up the whole house. For hours afterward, every time her own hair brushed against her arm, she flinched. She thought something was crawling on her. She couldn’t sleep. She came downstairs at one point wrapped in a blanket because she wanted to sit on the porch, except it was summer in Pensacola and she was wrapped in a blanket because going outside without a full body covering felt like acceptable terms.
It would be easy to write this off as overreacting. But I’ve watched her and I know the truth: she just can’t do it. The fear is real and it doesn’t respond to logic. So I started treating it like an engineering problem.
A behavioral scientist I’d been listening to put it plainly: behavior isn’t just personality. It’s an equilibrium of forces. Change the forces, and the behavior follows.
Savannah is a maker. She paints, does crafts, builds things. She also collects cardboard. Toilet paper rolls, paper towel rolls, boxes from deliveries. She wants all of it. I’ve had variations of the same conversation with her for years: Savannah, that’s trash. There will be more cardboard when you need it. You don’t need to keep it. She keeps it anyway, stacked in her closet like she’s preparing for a shortage.
I started noticing silverfish. A few here, a few there. I looked them up and found out they thrive in humidity above 50% relative humidity. More specifically, they come in on cardboard packaging, breed in it, and spread from there. The cardboard in Savannah’s closet wasn’t just her quirk. It was a habitat.
But the cardboard was only part of it. The other part was the air itself.
I bought a hygrometer and started collecting data. Morning, noon, and night. Main living area, bathroom, upstairs hallway. My house has two stories, which adds complexity. Humidity behaves differently on each floor, especially in Pensacola where the air outside is basically a warm wet towel eight months of the year.
What I found was worse than I expected. The bathroom in the mornings was running at 67% relative humidity. One morning, while I was checking the reading, a silverfish ran across the floor like it owned the place. Because, technically, it did. My house was a perfectly conditioned silverfish resort: high humidity, abundant cardboard, consistent warmth. I had built them exactly what they needed.
The fix was straightforward once I understood the cause. I bought a portable dehumidifier and placed it in the upstairs hallway, central to all the rooms. I cleaned out Savannah’s closet and got rid of the cardboard. I expected a fight on that last part. Instead, she surprised me. Once I explained the connection between the boxes and the bugs, she was on board immediately. She cared about the outcome more than the collection.
The dehumidifier keeps the house around 50% now. I have not seen a single bug since.
There’s a side effect I didn’t anticipate. I sweat at night. A lot. I keep the AC at 69 and I still wake up damp. Turns out lower humidity helps with that too. Less moisture in the air means less moisture on skin, less environment for the fungal activity that makes night sweats worse. The house became more comfortable for everyone, not just Savannah.
I still have my exterminator, come every three months. He’s thorough and a little talkative, which I’ve made my peace with. He handles the things that aren’t humidity-related: ants chasing a forgotten parade bag of candy in Savannah’s room, the occasional intrusion that has nothing to do with moisture. Some bugs come for food. Some come for warmth. The dehumidifier doesn’t solve everything. But it solved the thing that was actually driving the problem.
Savannah went to the beach last weekend.
She didn’t come back wrapped in a blanket. She didn’t ask to leave early. The bugs are mostly gone, the house breathes easier, and she’s out there in the world doing the things she loves.
I didn’t solve her fear of bugs. That’s still hers to work through. What I solved was the environment that kept feeding it. Sometimes that’s enough. Not to fix the person, but to change the conditions around them so the fear has less evidence to stand on.
She still collects cardboard sometimes. Old habits. But she knows now why I ask her not to, and most of the time she listens.
That’s about as good as it gets with a teenager.
I have a granddaughter who is afraid of toads. It started when she was about 10 and we figured she would grow out of it but she is 22 now and still afraid of toads. When I know she is coming to visit I make a sweep of the patio and the front yard and the rose bushes and relocate any toads I find.