Family Daze
Best strategy for parents: agree on details of myths
By Debbie Farmer
The other day my friend Linda, who is an intelligent woman with a master's degree in psychology, looked at me and said, "So, how tall is the tooth fairy?" I should have seen this coming since, for some reason, these are just the types of conversations I've been having lately.
"About 12 inches," I said.
"Are you sure?" she said. "But how does she carry all the, you know, stuff?"
I narrowed my eyes, trying to figure out a polite way of asking if she'd been staining wood furniture in the garage again. Then I realized her daughter, as mine, was 7 years old--the age when children start wanting to know all the details about this sort of thing.
Believe me, it's times like this I start thinking back wistfully to my preparental days when I used to sit in coffeehouses with friends debating important issues like world politics, apartheid, and the hidden meaning behind Pink Floyd lyrics. But since my daughter and her friends turned 7, all that is over. In fact, the last time I met a friend for coffee we spent 20 minutes discussing exactly how the Easter Bunny gets into the house to deliver baskets and if, in fact, it is a girl or a boy.
I used to be baffled about why people brought up these sorts of topics. Perhaps it was because I was a teacher they considered me to be some sort of expert. Or perhaps I looked like the type of person who should know about fairies and bunnies. Or perhaps, they thought if we all stuck to the same story, our children would believe them a little bit longer.
So you would think that, by now, parents would have banded together and standardized all of the childhood myths. That way, when all of the 7-year-olds huddle together at recess time to compare notes, they would agree that the tooth fairy wears a sequined gown with matching wings, carries the teeth away in a gold lamé backpack, and pays $1 per tooth. And that the Easter Bunny is a boy who wears overalls with a jaunty straw hat, and gets baskets into the house by magically shrinking them and squeezing them underneath the front door.
You would think we could make all leprechauns three inches tall, so we can easily explain why they always escape from the shoe-box sized traps elementary school teachers require us to make each year for extra credit.
Call me weird, but these are the things that keep me up at night.
Of course I know that standardizing myths seems a little silly. Nothing can prevent children from finding out the truth eventually, but you must admit it would sure help parents keep things straight.
That reminds me, I've got to get going because my daughter lost another tooth and she's expecting a dollar from a 12-inch-tall fairy with a gold lamé backpack.
Well, that's my story--and I'm sticking to it.
Debbie Farmer can be contacted at ParadigmTSA@familydaze.com. Copies of her new e-book, "The Best of Family Daze," can be purchased at her website, www.familydaze.com.
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Saratoga, California Since 1955
