I saw this strip on Penny Arcade today and related to it all too well. While I often enjoy this strip because I can identify with these characters, I usually find myself aligning more with Tycho than Gabe. But in today’s strip, I definitely felt a kinship to Gabe and could picture my brother-in-law spouting off something similar to the other side of this conversation. And though I know I’ve been known to say things nearly as bizarre myself, now being a parent I find that I need to be careful about how I represent the world as I see it around my kids.
I’m not exactly saying that I believe in werewolves and vampires and such, but I am often a strong proponent for the fact that not everything is as black and white as we’d like to think it is. There are plenty of mysteries and unknowns in the world. But children aren’t ready for that type of thinking until much later in life (sometimes not until college, sometimes not ever). So when my daughter tells me she is scared that bad guys are going to get her at night, I have to tell her that they won’t even though I can’t possibly know that. While they odds are strongly stacked against it – we live in a modest house that is an unlikely target and statistically most robberies happen during the day – but who knows what types of crackpots are lurking out there and what they are looking for.
I also have to be careful about what my kids believe is real. While I love that my daughter gets into comic book superhero cartoons like Spider-man and Superman, I make it a point to explain that these are merely characters and that they make the movies using special effects and computer graphics. As a result, she loves watching the special features on such DVDs to see how they made the movies (which is impressive to make that connection at age 4). She knows that she isn’t really likely to be bitten by an irradiated spider and gain super powers as a result, but has just as much fun pretending as she would otherwise so I’m assuming I’m doing something right.