Since Objectivists recognize evasion as the basis of all immorality, many of us are struggling with the issue of children’s fantasies and whether using their imaginations in some improper way might lead to evasion. Of course, imagination is one of the tools that makes evasion possible. Rational Jenn just posted a great storyof an instance when she thought her son might be doing exactly that, and how she dealt with it. I think that story is an excellent concretization of the difference between proper fantasy and evasion and I highly recommend that you read it before continuing with this post.
(By the way, I don’t think children can be morally judged as having “evaded” in the adult sense. Jenn’s child appeared to be “testing out” evasion based on what he said to his mom. Even this “testing,” I think, is proper in the sense that children need to try it to see what happens. Even if Jenn hadn’t taken any action based on what her son said, he would have found out that the evasion didn’t do him any good when he came up against the reality he was seeking to avoid. She chose to make the lesson explicit because it is such an important issue, and I would probably do the same, but the point is that children are going to test this out, just like they test boundaries, patience, truthfulness, and everything else. This is their job!)
Imagination is not equivalent to evasion. Imagination is the mental aspect of human productivity. If productivity is taking materials that exist and rearranging them into something that is valuable to man, imagination is the rearrangement of thoughts that can lead to new ideas that are valuable to man, or, eventually to new products as well. Oh, wow, I wrote that before I looked this up, and here is what Ayn Rand has to say about imagination, which is, of course, much more clear:
“Imagination is not a faculty for escaping reality, but a faculty for rearranging the elements of reality to achieve human values; it requires and presupposes some knowledge of the elements one chooses to rearrange. An imagination divorced from knowledge has only one product: a nightmare . . . An imagination that replaces cognition is one of the surest ways to create neurosis.”
--Ayn Rand, quoted in “The Montessori Method,” The Objectivist, July, 1970, 7.
I believe that fantasy, in children, is the exercise of this human capacity of imagination. (By "exercise," I mean specifically that it is practice and work, not that it is just the childish form of imagination.) Note that fantasy is a universal amongst children. Their fantasies often revolve around what they know: pretending to put dolls to sleep, an imaginary pet or friend, or acting out stories they’ve read in books. They don’t make things up out of whole cloth. (However, I am very curious about the almost universal phenomenon of children thinking there are “monsters” in the dark and where they get the idea of a monster. I suspect a monster symbolizes the unknown or inexplicable to a child, but that’s a more specific topic I’ll leave for another post.)
I think it is extremely harmful to treat a child’s fantasies as “lies,” as many parents seem to do. I’m talking about very young children here. I only have experience with my own, who is 3, so I’ll limit myself to that age group. At this age, I think lying is very rare. By lying, I mean the faking of reality in order to try to gain an unearned value (although it does happen, even at 3). What usually happens are things like the child saying, “Mommy, there is an alligator in the back yard,” or “I ran by myself all the way to school.” I feel very strongly that chastising the child for this type of statement is a terrible mistake.
First, assume positive intent. (God, I love that principle!) Assume that the child has some valid purpose for these statements and try to imagine what it might be. Maybe the child sees something in the back yard that looks like an alligator, or he sees something and doesn’t know what it is, but an alligator is the first thing that came to mind. Maybe the child has been practicing running lately and imagines how great it would be to run all the way to school but doesn’t know yet how to express, “I imagine” in any other way than “I did.” I don’t think there is one proper way to respond to these kinds of statements, but here are some ideas:
- You see an alligator! Show me. Oh, I can’t see it, sorry.
- Where is the alligator? What is he doing? Should we pretend he is eating our flowers?
- Show me the alligator. Oh! Does that bush look like an alligator? I see what you mean.
- Is there something scary in the yard? Tell me more about it.
- You ran to school by yourself? How did you get home?
- Are you thinking about running to school by yourself or did you actually do it?
- Did you run really fast? It’s fun to imagine things we like to do.
- Do you want to go outside and run right now?
These are just some thoughts. You can subtlety point the child to the idea of imagination without morally judging him. You can also simply say, “Oh.” I see no danger in letting the child fantasize without “correction.” I do think that children need some guidance in identifying what is real versus what is imagined, but they do not need to be told every single time it comes up. They do learn from reality and there is much more going on in their minds than they can express. My daughter started identifying “pretend” versus “real” when she was just over 2 years old. This does not mean that she has yet properly categorized everything in her world into one camp or another. I’m sure she doesn’t know that there is no real magic and she might not even know that there is not a real Snow White out in the world somewhere. But I’m pretty sure that she knows that animals can’t talk like they do in her books and that ghosts are a silly scary thing we make up to play games where we get to say “Boo!” I’m completely comfortable that she will go on and figure these things out, mostly on her own. As long as you aren’t Parenting by Authority, there is no reason for a child to be confused about this issue. What they do need is lots of experience and a nudge here and an explanation there.
By equating fantasy with lying or evasion, you will be teaching your child to shut down the creative part of his mind. And shutting down your mind in any way is evasion. Without his creative faculty, a child will seek guidance from another source and the only option is to seek it from others. This is a recipe for dependence and secondhandedness. When you tell the child, “there is no alligator in the yard,” you might have told him the truth, but you have ignored the inner process of the child – the process that he is using to learn, for himself, about what is real and what is imagined. Let the child be firsthanded and learn the method, and the content (the truth) will follow on its own.
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