What children, in fact all of us at any age, find frightening is unreliability and emotional coldness. The idea that you can't affect someone, that you can't see where they're coming from and can change tact at any moment.
There's this myth in drama, which I think comes from theatre, and I think it comes from writers, who are too articulate for their own good, that everyone is sincere and able to communicate their ideas exactly at the moment that they are having their ideas. And it's not the way it is. And you can explore that in cinema. I tend to make friends with film-makers who are interested in inarticulacy.
This is what happens: People quote back at you things that you said a very long time ago in some joking conversation with somebody, and they wrote it down and somebody else reads it back to you 10 years later.