Last Tuesday, my wife and I put on Twister for family movie night. We had thought our 7-year-old daughter was old enough for it, but alas, she was terrified and has been scared to go outside ever since. She cries when we ask her to come outside with us and is convinced that a tornado will come down from the sky. I’d like to think I am a creative person, but I’m running out of ideas to fix this. Any suggestions?

Inquisitively,

Fretting Mom

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Dear FM,

You should’ve gone with the Milton Bradley game instead. It’s great for cocktail parties and really gets things going. Of course, your daughter might be equally traumatized after a night of Twister with the family. She’d probably fare better with Operation.

Remember that one, with the tweezers and stupid buzzing, and that guy’s big, red nose? My poor cousin, Melvin Perfect, never finished medical school. He couldn’t pass the final exam, a high-stakes game of Operation.

Perhaps the film’s special effects were just too convincing. Explain to your daughter that they are largely computer-generated and no more real than Bigfoot or the moon landing. Assuage her fears now before she becomes a tireless shut-in too afraid to go out for groceries and obsessing over germs with her virtual therapist.

Any tornado movie is an allegory of the trauma of farm life. My grandmother was raised on a farm and conveyed as much in her “Farm Life” column for Farmer’s Weekly Digest Magazine. Her prized cow Petunia was swept into a cyclone much like the famous scene from Twister. Grandma Perfect was never the same.

I sometimes think of a simple life on the farm. It’s a lot of hard work, though, and I loathe getting my hands dirty. Early mornings aren’t my thing either. Livestock also gives me the creeps. Just give me some steak and eggs, prole!

You can show your daughter that there are scarier things than tornadoes. War, famine, and disease come to mind, but that’s a lot for a child to comprehend. Put on the 1974 Charlton Heston disaster pic Earthquake. With any luck, that turkey of a film will make her less afraid of anything.

Dr. Perfect has slung advice across the globe for the last two decades due to his dedication to the uplift of the human condition.