Is Barney Real?
Questions and memories about imaginary beings have been coming my way - emails, blog comments, personal conversations - ever since my last post (Trusting the Tooth Fairy, June 29th). Last Saturday, driving with my radio on, I was surprised to hear the topic aired in a larger arena:
The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Agency issued a statement this week after receiving several queries following the broadcast of an Animal Planet program called "Mermaids: The Body Found."
The show featured several people searching for what they believed were mermaids, although the program left a strong suggestion they were actually fish, shadows and coral, not mermaids. But NOAA still felt that the organization had to issue a statement saying, quote, "No evidence of aquatic humanoids has ever been found. . . "
So, here's hoping the Department of Health and Human Services can eventually find the tooth fairy.
SCOTT SIMON, NPR News, July 12th, 2012.
Clearly, the yearning to be in contact with extraordinary friends is not restricted to children! Here are some highlights of my recent “tooth fairy conversations.”
I call up my farmer neighbor to see if he’d sell me some eggs. Then I tell him I’ve written about our Santa Claus conversation in my Tooth Fairy post.
“Oh, no,” he says. “I’ll sound like the Grinch.”
“It brought up some interesting questions,” I say. “It made me think about why it’s good for kids to have those invisible characters in their lives.”
“Why?”
“Because real people let you down, but imaginary people don’t.”
There is a comprehending silence at the other end of the phone. “I can get behind that,” he says. “I feel that, too, all the energy out there in the universe. So I’m fine with the fairies and elves and guys like that. It’s just the commercialism that gets to me.”
It’s a real issue, the commercialism! Especially in the current marketing climate, where movies and TV shows are designed with a full line of toys. Young children can’t tell the difference between advertisements and the program. These “infomercials” become powerful forces in children’s minds and lives. The characters the children encounter may have less to do with what they need to grow than what will get them (and their parents) to the toy store.
And no matter what the conscious mind may tell us, the images we see moving on screens are processed by the brain as “real.” So anything a child sees onscreen tends to override the imagination. Children tend to insist that stories they’ve experienced through movies and videos have to be re-enacted the way they “really” go! This can lock the imagination into a box.
When stories and characters are experienced through hearing stories, reading, seeing pictures or objects, there is more room for the imagination to operate. Children’s “friends” can grow and change as they do.
In a comment box, a father relates the story of how his (now grown) son asked if Santa Claus was an imaginary person. For fifty years, this man believed that his son was “satisfied” by the revelation. But in an email last week, he found that this impression was not shared by his son!
“When I was with my son yesterday sitting on the beach I told him about my sharing with you his 5 yr old dialogue. He immediately corrected me and said he had been 4, not 5. He also said that he had been more upset than he had let on, but that it had been a helpful way for him to learn more about ‘reality’.”
We often forget that what we see is not always what is roiling below the surface. Kids often don’t let on to what is really bothering them. Or they tell us about something else that hides the real thing. And then we can’t figure out why they’re in a funk.
This especially happens, I think, with children who possess educated parents, good vocabularies, and precocious minds. Hearing their adult-sounding words and watching their “mature” behaviors, we adults can forget that children are still operating as their own developmental age. Instead, we tend to assume that the words children parrot mean the same things to them that they mean to us. They usually don’t.
A little girl comes to see me in my office. “She is very quiet today,” says her mother. I hand the little girl a “magic wand,” she closes her eyes and wishes hard. As she lies on her stomach and draws a picture of her brother and herself, I do some craniosacral work and reflex integration on her back. I invite the mom to hold her feet, the K-1 Fear Paralysis points. We sing to her, a simple call-and-response song.
Eventually, the girl says, “I had a nightmare last night.”
It can take a lot of time and love to create the safety to unlock the scary things inside! We work on releasing the nightmare, and at the end of the session the girl cuddles in her mother’s lap.
Later, in the comment box, I find that the nightmare was not the only thing that had been bothering her:
On our way to see you today, Eve, I was trying to probe my daughter out of her silent funk. She finally confessed that she was thinking about how her brother had told her that Barney is not real.
Siblings and friends can be at different levels of development and understanding, and the more “sophisticated” ones do not spare the sensibilities of the more “childlike!” It is important to for parents to create the safety for children to remain as young as they need to be, to grow at their own paces.
There are various possible answers for a child who asks, “Is Barney (or Santa Claus or The Tooth Fairy) real?” Here are two suggestions:
1. What do you think?
2. Yes.