“Mummie, are bad guys real?”
It’s the sort of question you don’t want to answer as a
parent. Up there with am I going
to die someday and does Santa really exist. You want to be honest, but you don’t want to terrify or
disillusion. My daughter, 5, watches
enough Disney to know about villains but she also recently learned the terms
fiction and nonfiction. And she
wants help differentiating between them.
I tell her they are real, but, hedging, say there aren’t any
around here. I regret the caveat immediately.
We live in a safe zip code but I shouldn’t whitewash. Turns out she doesn’t
believe me anyway, because it’s not much later that she begins asking me, at
bedtime, whether I’ve locked the front door. It becomes enough of a ritual that I allow her to do it
herself, to eliminate the question from her mind, empower her and, hopefully,
allay her fears.
So what about villains? What’s the RDA of evil for kindergarteners? I took my
daughter to see Beauty and the Beast in 3D recently. It’s a hackneyed story, but I like its Technicolor shades of
gray. The Beast is a Beast but
also a Prince. Gaston is a catch
but also a big old jerk. And while
we certainly should take all things Disney with a grain of salt, there are
archetypal bones in its storytelling. Good vs. evil is a very human framework
for understanding the world around us.
And it starts being applied very young. The challenge for parents is to help tease out that not everything
falls into one camp or the other. There are some things, some people, who fall
into both.
Which brings me to the 3D experience we’re having at school
just now. A beloved teacher, with
a perfectly clean 12-year record, has been arrested on child pornography
charges. We struggle with the
impossible question: how could someone perform so well in one role, while
simultaneously, truthfully, being so absolutely wrong for that role? He was a terrific teacher. And quite the criminal. He seemed a Prince, but was truly, at
his core, a Beast. The story is meant to move in the other direction – what
seems bad should turn out to be good.
It’s why, though I allow Disney in my house, I do not allow the TV news.
Am I over-sanitizing? Is this the emotional equivalent of too much Purel? Turns
out it’s not effective anyway, evil can come in like fog under the door. Loss of innocence, no matter how
incremental, is a one-way street.
So far, my attempts to explain and answer my daughter’s
questions have felt half-assed and imperfect. She has heard certain (sordid) truths from classmates and
more general, sanitized explanations from her teachers. She’s afraid to tell me
what she knows; it’s embarrassing. “He took pictures of naked people!” she
finally whispers, after much cajoling, then buries her head under her pillow. I
wish it were only embarrassing. I
tell her he broke the law by taking those pictures, he can never be a teacher
again, he will never hurt anyone else. School will go on just as before and yes,
you are safe there. But I can’t
promise that. I’d give my life to have it so, but I can’t offer her a guarantee.
A fact that will always frighten me more than her.
So yes, Sweetpea, bad guys are real. They come in all shapes
and sizes and you can’t tell what they are just by looking at them. So we lock
our doors and don’t talk to strangers and speak up when we feel frightened or
unsafe or threatened. But know there are a hell of a lot more good guys than
bad guys. This is when I’m glad
she identifies more with superheroes than princesses. So I invoke Firestar and
Batman and Anakin Skywalker. And
maybe it’s time for a little more Marvel Comics and George Lucas in our lives.
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