I buried a wooden ship in the sand at the beach when my little boy was 5 years old.
We were digging sand castles when "he found it".
Back at the house when his grandfather was having a closer look at the ship, grandad "discovered" an old map and little key inside the ship - strange we hadn't noticed it earlier.
The map had a big X marked on it - also down at the beach near a big cave. I happened to know just that area....
So we went down there and dug in the sand and found a wooden treasure box wrapped in a metal chain and padlocked. When my little boy tried the key in the lock.... it fit!
Inside the box was overflowing with jewellery and coins and weird little trinkets. He had discovered buried treasure!
In fact I had bought the wooden ship, and the wooden jewellery box from the local opportunity shop and also bought $5 worth of shiny junk jewellery and old overseas coins and trinkets and filled it up. I then bought a chain and padlock and wrapped it up and buried it.
He's 11 years old now and still doesn't know the true story. Credit is due to my friend who did this first - he buried a pouch in the sand for his kids to find - I just expanded on the idea with the ship and the map and the treasure box, chains and padlock etc.
This sort of thing seems also useful to teach to the youngster, upon the time he understands/learns that he was tricked, that even folks may lie to him (deliberately or not).
In a society truth is less important than relationships, communication, shared "knowledge" (myths).
It may be one of the reason why the Santa Claus character (among other ones) stays "alive" in the culture.
Ps. Watching this scene feels like almost all the employee stock option situations I OH in the Bay Area. Thankfully Carta is there to show you how little you get as an employee if and only if you go public.
It’s not lying, it’s called make believe [1]. Children play this way all the time. It’s a healthy part of development. Adults play along with Santa Claus, the Easter bunny, and the tooth fairy. When kids get older and figure it out, they generally have fond memories of it. The only cases I’ve heard of where it was upsetting was when somebody else spoiled it for them, just like how people spoiled the end of the 6th Harry Potter book.
Adults do it all the time as well, when we consume fiction. It feels good to escape our current reality and inhabit another, magical reality, if only for a while. It’s a healthy thing to do as long as it doesn’t lead to a breakdown in our relationships and other aspects of our lives.
I'm really more and more convinced that each and every human group has such foundations ("myths"), and that the larger the group, the larger the distortion between the myth and reality.
There is an hypothesis about the origin of the "hacker" state of mind (as a strong urge to understand how things work) stating that many of them think/thought that, as youngsters, they were lied to (cannot find the reference, though).
Available informative resources played a huge part in mine. (One of the reasons I despair about the modern internet filling kids' time with cotton candy trivia)
With a pathologist father, 3rd grade biology questions digressed into two hour linked list lectures on biochemistry.
I distinctly remember the joy inspired by finding out about the-thing-behind-the-thing though!
When I was a kid we went hiking in the mountains with my dad and my uncle every fall catching small trouts (50-150g I guess) in the creeks using wooden poles and worms on hooks.
I was a grown up before it dawned to me that if it wasn't for us they could have gone somewhere else and caught real fish.
They never said anything but today I do the same: sometimes we go hiking on Sundays before or after church, "expeditions into the wilderness", tenting in the garden.
A little, yeah. I wrestled with this as a parent as my kids got older and older. At some point my seven year old asked me is Santa was real and why we would tell her he’s real. Explained the fun and magic of Christmas, etc and I don’t think it was traumatic or anything, but definitely made me feel a little down.
Parents "lie" to their kids about things like Santa because they remember the magical world that was created for them from their own childhoods, before the reality of a world with no Santa, murder, disease, death etc intruded on their reality.
Which is better, telling your child:
"yeah you will lose all your baby teeth and each one will hurt and bleed and make you look silly with big gaps in your mouth"
or
"oooh you lost a tooth, now let's put it under your pillow and the tooth fairy will exchange it for a little gift while you sleep"
I don't understand why you put "lie" in quotes. Even if you believe it is done for a good reason, it is most certainly lieing.
You have a wide variety of choices as to what to tell your child that doesn't include lieing. You can celebrate the loss of a tooth as a positive step of growing up without telling a lie about a creepy fairy that sneeks into houses and collects teeth.
Adults may rationalize to themselves that they lie to children to protect the children, but I think it is often more motivated by the adults' desire to avoid having an uncomfortable and difficult conversation.
Memories are real, experiences are as real as one wants them to be.
We all learn critical thinking and separating fact from fiction eventually, but that doesn’t mean you can’t look back fondly on experiences you enjoyed as a kid.
Or... They could appreciate the amount of effort that their parent made into making the world magical for them, they might reflect on that when they have children and do the same, and they'll be grateful for a wonderful upbringing.
I don't think my father was capable of that level of imagination. I think he would have trouble conceiving that such obvious childish could actually enchant a child, and it would mean so much to them. You're a good father, I'm glad they exist.
When I was 4 or 5 my grandma took the leftover chicken bones from lunch and buried them in the garden. Then me and grandma went on an "archeological" dig, looking for Neanderthal bones. (for some reason as a kid I was more fascinated by prehistoric hominids than dinosaurs)
Don't know. I figure one day it will come out, no hurry to dispel the magic till then.
If you like that sort of thing:
Last year for his birthday I spent several months preparing an alien treasure hunt in the park for his birthday.
The idea was an alien spacecraft had crashed in the park and eight 10 year old boys were needed to go hunting for the clues to help the aliens get home.
As we drove down there listening to the radio I had an IOT device that transmitted its own AM radio station to the car radio with an urgent announcement about a crashed alien spacecraft nearby.
I prepared all sorts of gadgets and electronic devices - sound effects and lights - gave the kids bluetooth buttons to search for things and had little IOT devices that played sounds when the buttons came in range. I made audio mission cards which played audible missions to the kids (made from audio greeting card mechanisms). I bought tiny little glow in the dark aliens and little led lights that I scattered around the park. The kids found a nest of alien eggs that they had to eat (chocolate eggs).
The finale was they had to tie the tiny aliens to helium balloons and send them into the sky to "send them home".
I spent months writing code and preparing it all. Only about half worked on the night!!
I think I had more fun making it all than the kids did doing it.
>The finale was they had to tie the tiny aliens to helium balloons and send them into the sky to "send them home".
I'm going to be "that guy" - don't do this. What goes up must come down, so it essentially amounts to littering bits of rubber and plastic ribbon everywhere which pose a choking threat to wildlife - particularly marine wildlife, if they make it that far.
We were digging sand castles when "he found it".
Back at the house when his grandfather was having a closer look at the ship, grandad "discovered" an old map and little key inside the ship - strange we hadn't noticed it earlier.
The map had a big X marked on it - also down at the beach near a big cave. I happened to know just that area....
So we went down there and dug in the sand and found a wooden treasure box wrapped in a metal chain and padlocked. When my little boy tried the key in the lock.... it fit!
Inside the box was overflowing with jewellery and coins and weird little trinkets. He had discovered buried treasure!
In fact I had bought the wooden ship, and the wooden jewellery box from the local opportunity shop and also bought $5 worth of shiny junk jewellery and old overseas coins and trinkets and filled it up. I then bought a chain and padlock and wrapped it up and buried it.
He's 11 years old now and still doesn't know the true story. Credit is due to my friend who did this first - he buried a pouch in the sand for his kids to find - I just expanded on the idea with the ship and the map and the treasure box, chains and padlock etc.