@nimis….They do know. Deep inside, they do know. But they WANT it to be real. It just reminds me of a time when my grandson, Ryan, was 5. He was forever dressed up as a Super Hero of some kind.
His mom found a rock at my house and the rock had some moss on it. She left it here for the moment, thinking it was cool and she wanted to take it home. Well, Ryan pulled the moss off. He wasn’t being deliberately “bad,” he didn’t realize his mom had claimed the rock. It really wasn’t that big of a deal, but his Uncle Chris, who was 12 at the time, carelessly said, “Ooooo! You’re going to be in big trouble now! That was your mamma’s rock!” just kind of giving the kid a hard time, not realizing how utterly seriously Ryan would take it (He loved Ryan. He would never deliberately hurt him…or anyone else.)
Well, about 15 minutes later I finally realized something was really wrong with Ryan, so I called him over and asked him what was wrong. He said he’d pulled the moss off of his mom’s rock and didn’t know he wasn’t supposed to. He was just devastated. He said, “I tried to put it back on, but I couldn’t.”
My heart started aching…and then he started pulling off his super hero cape and sword and what not and said, so, so sadly, so tiredly, “I’m not a super hero. I’m just Ryan.” My heart just broke into a million pieces. I pulled him in my lap and held him for a while. I said, “You ever do something because it seems like a cool thing to do, and then you find out it was the wrong thing to do?”
He nodded yes, tears silently dripping down his face.
I said, “I’ve done that too.”
He looked up at me with tearful amazement, a glimmer of hope in his eyes, and said, “You have?”
I said, “Yes. We all have. That’s how we learn. That moss felt cool when you pulled it off, didn’t it. I would have done the same thing! You didn’t know it was your mom’s. ”
We got through it, but those defeated words, “I’m not a super hero. I’m just Ryan,” will echo in my mind forever. I want to cry just thinking about it. They know. They WANT to believe.
@AmWiser that is really beside the point. There are issues that need to be referred back to the parents if they come up. If a kid had asked the teacher (the music teacher no less) where babies come from, that needs to be referred back to the parents. Right or wrong, there are some things that are firmly in the parent’s court, and no one elses.