My 11-year-old son and I had reached an ideological impasse.  Naturally, it involved Legos.

From the moment he wrapped his tiny, toddler fingers around a big red Duplo, Charlie has had a love affair with Legos—one that my wife and I wholeheartedly endorsed.  Granted, it’s not the cheapest hobby out there. (I’m looking at you, $1800 Ultimate Collector’s Millennium Falcon!)  Nor is it the neatest; thanks to the crunch-coating of little bricks scattered all over the place, I haven’t seen our playroom carpet for seven years.  But we can overlook the downsides of Lego-collecting, because the mini-figures are cute, and because playing with Legos fires the imagination and sparks creativity.

I mean… they do, right?  At least, they did back in the 1970s, when I was first introduced to the infectious little bricks. Oh, sure, the Lego-folks would provide simple instructions, and I’d follow them—once.  But I always found more satisfaction in creating something on my own—a boxy spaceship, say, or an asymmetrical, multicolored house.  I didn’t always have the exact right piece I needed, but I improvised.  And finally, after hours of painstaking, hunched-over work, I beheld my completed masterpiece… for about three minutes, at which point I took the thing apart and started building something else.

My son Charlie, however, takes a different approach.

Charlie, you see, was born into the age of “sets”—pre-fab collections such as Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Atlantis, Power Miners, Ninjago.  Of course, growing up, I had sets, too, but they were nowhere near as intricate and sophisticated as these bad boys.  In fact, the vehicles and buildings contained in these modern sets are almost too intricate and sophisticated—to the point that you don’t want to take them apart. Ever.

And even if Charlie did feel inspired to take apart one of his creations, he may find himself faced with a curious problem: some of the pieces required to make the original contraption are so specific, so particular to that set, he may have trouble using them for anything else.

So, yes, Lego sets have evolved, but you have to wonder:  have they evolved to the point where they actually discourage the imagination and creativity that they’re supposed to instill?

Basically, it comes down to a battle of wills:  on one side, you have me, a product of the generation that believes that Lego creations aren’t meant to be models or monoliths, that the new sets tend to straitjacket creativity, and that building something once seems like an incredible waste of money.  Then, across the divide, you have my son Charlie, who puts his sets together with an engineer’s precision, who has plenty of imagination, thank you very much, and who considers deliberately dismantling something you labored for hours on a waste of time. Besides, why would you take apart something as freakin’ cool as the Ninjago “Garmadon’s Dark Fortress”?

Hence, the ideological impasse.

And this isn’t just me being a crank—or if it is, at least I have some company. A September 5, 2009 New York Times article quotes child psychologist who has my back on this issue: “When you have a less structured, less themed set, kids have the ability to start from scratch,” says Dr. Jonathan Sinowitz. “When you have kids playing out Indiana Jones, they’re playing out Hollywood’s imagination, not their own.”

And a gentleman known only as Seth who writes for the site MoxieBird puts it this way: “When you buy your kid a Lego set today, you’re buying 300 pieces that have no magic inside.  They’re created to be used in very specific, singular ways.  And by the time your kid is finished building with them, it’ll be attributed to his or her ability to follow instructions really, really well.”

Flanked by these experts and utterly convinced of my self-righteousness, I decided to give my son a patented “when-I-was-a-lad” lecture about the proper way to play with Legos.  Before I did, though, I thought I’d look at things from Charlie’s point of view. And I mean, literally: I crouched down and really examined one of his newer sets, the “Portal of Atlantis.”

I survey the black-and-maroon temple, home to the evil, trident-wielding Portal Emperor and his Squid-Warrior goons, finally fixing my eyes on the ominous shark façade in the center.  I tug on the shark’s head as its jaws yawn open to reveal a set of stairs leading to the Portal, a circular doorway with eight crystal fangs that can only be unlocked by the turn of a special key, one of five keys spread throughout the ocean.  Once opened, the intrepid divers can finally gain access to the mythical kingdom for which they’ve long been searching:  the lost city of Atlantis.

And as I toured through this rich, textured world (and read up on the back-story provided by Lego.com), a realization washed over me: what a neat place to play.

See, I don’t really remember “playing” a lot with Legos as a kid.  The creating was the playing.  Not only that, but our end products weren’t necessarily worth playing with. Look at the sets available thirty years ago. A house. A police station. The occasional fire boat. And another house.  Quaint and all, sure… but honestly, how far can you go with those?

On the other hand, this new generation of Lego enthusiasts actually plays with their creations.  Just the other day, for example, I overheard Charlie playing with his Lego Slave 1, the infinitely cool spaceship piloted by Boba Fett. When I asked him what he was doing, he explained, “Well, Bossk hijacked the Slave 1, so Boba Fett had to get into a police car to get him.”

The fact is, they do play, these kids.  They do play with their Legos. It may be a different kind of play than I’m used to, but who am I to say it’s not “play”?  Who made me the Emperor of the Imagination Portal?

So have I softened on my “Legos Kill Creativity” stance? I was suspecting I might be, but then something happened recently that confirmed it.  I was trying to unearth something in our perennially cluttered playroom, when I saw my son’s Slave 1 on the floor.  The inner geek in me came to the surface (it didn’t have far to travel), and I picked up the hallowed vehicle to marvel at it.  Naturally, in the process of handling it, part of the front hull crumbled apart.

Now, I could have left it partially disassembled, in the hopes that it would force Charlie into building something new, something different.  But I didn’t. In truth, it didn’t even occur to me.  Instead, I immediately and instinctively picked up the fallen pieces and delicately put the ship back together. After all, this is the Slave 1, for crying out loud:  How could I let it fall into disrepair?  Besides, Charlie may have some unfinished playing to do.

Our vacation had everything going for it… except for one catch.

Several years ago, my wife and I celebrated our tenth anniversary with a trip to Bermuda. It sounded perfect, in theory: Five kid-less, fancy-free days, relaxing on the shores of Elbow Beach.  Little did we know that, in practice, we’d be contending with a veritable tropical storm of bad karma.

First, our flight there was delayed ten hours. And then, when we finally arrived, we were greeted with three days of rain—the cold, constant, stay-in-your-hotel-room kind of rain. The sort of weather Bermuda never gets in April, according to the natives.  Like I said, bad karma.

And the worst part? I think I may have caused it.

Even in theory, you see, the trip came with a caveat: we had to take a plane there.  Now, I never had a fear of flying before. I’ve flown plenty of places in my life, and each time, I boarded the plane without entertaining a single doomsday notion. Then I had kids.

I’m not saying I haven’t flown since I became a father. We’ve flown to Disney World twice, and I once took a solo flight to Washington D.C. However, since we became parents, my wife and I had never flown anywhere, just the two of us—i.e. sans kids. A critical difference.

It’s not that I have an irrational fear of dying in a fiery wreck. I mean, I wouldn’t love it, but… hey, good life, I suppose. On the other hand, my wife and I both dying in a fiery wreck, leaving my kids with no parents—yeah, that freaks me out a little.

More than a little, actually. In the weeks leading up to our Bermuda trip, I poured so much negative energy into the universe that I suspect the universe decided to get back at me. Hence, the ten-hour delay followed by three days of cold, clammy, climatically-aberrant rainfall.

Now I know what you’re asking yourselves: “Well, you and your wife have gone places together in your car, haven’t you? Statistically speaking, aren’t you more likely to die a car accident than die in a plane crash?”

To wit, I say, “Ah, yes: the Rational Argument. Which under normal circumstances would be quite valid. But this is parenting we’re talking about. And nothing about parenting is rational.”

Think about it this way: You know Spock, the Vulcan from Star Trek? For almost forty-five years, people have been telling stories about him, on TV, in movies, in books. And no matter the incarnation, Spock has never had a child. There’s a reason for that.

Spock, you see, is driven by logic and reason. And, strictly speaking, a logical, reasonable person would never have children, if only because doing so transforms one into a creature utterly incapable of rational thought.

What do you think Spock, with his vaunted logical mind, would say about college-prep courses for kindergarteners? Or about parents who spend hundreds of dollars on a birthday gala for their seven-year-old, in a desperate attempt to out-Gatsby the party their neighbors had for their seven-year-old? What would a galaxy-hopper like Spock say about a grown man suddenly developing crippling aviophobia?

I think I know exactly what he’d say. He’d arch his eyebrow waaaay up there and deadpan, “None of this is logical.”

And he’d be right, because nothing about parenting is rational, not even the desire to become parents. Sure, maybe on some level, we have some desire to continue the human race, but that strikes me as an instinctual urge, something we share with guinea hens and wildebeests, rather than a rational decision.

And you can try your darnedest to apply logic to parenting. You can buy all the parenting books in the world, and maybe even get around to reading one. But when the count is 3 and 2, and there are runners on first and second, and your team is down by one, and your whole life—everything you’ve ever done or hope to do—boils down to whether or not your nine-year-old makes contact with a five-ounce spheroid… well, as Spock might say, you’ve long left the Rational Zone and are now adrift in the Quadrant of the Cosmically Insane.

When it comes to their children, parents lose their ability to think rationally. And you know what? Maybe that’s not such a bad thing.

Hey, I’m not condoning the Gatsby parties. Nor am I excusing my irrational fears leading up to our Bermuda trip. I basically robbed my wife of the chance to get excited about our vacation, and I still feel bad about that.

Still, these are your kids—your flesh and blood, your tickets to immortality, the receptacles into which you can pour all that unconditional love you got stored up. You’re allowed to be a little irrational about them once in a while, right?

Having kids is probably the most irrational, illogical thing you can do with your life; conveniently enough, it’s also the greatest thing. This is not as paradoxical as it seems. Turns out, most fulfilling, worthwhile endeavors—from believing in God to believing in the Red Sox—don’t make a whole lot of sense. And since having children is simply the most fulfilling, most worthwhile endeavor we can undertake in this life, it follows it’s also the most irrational.

I’m reminded of a story: It’s maybe the third day of our Bermuda trip. It’s still raining, but my wife and I decide to brave the elements and go swimming in the ocean. The wind has whipped the waves into a frenzy, and I spend the next hour body-surfing, letting myself get battered back and forth by the water’s wrath, feeling like a kid again. The undertow drags me back thirty years.

Was swimming in the cold rain an inherently stupid, irrational thing to do? Sure. Was it fun? Better believe it. Spock be damned, it was a freakin’ blast.

Photo from BBC

We take Halloween deadly serious at my house. In our front yard, heaps of fresh dirt cover new graves, a bloody brain roasts on a hibachi, femurs litter the ground. Standing amid all this store-bought devastation, 9-year-old Ethan inserts a severed arm into his own sweater sleeve, then gravely offers to shake my hand.

Is it really healthy to allow kids to feel the chill of good old fashioned terror this season? Or am I setting up my son for sleepless nights and future therapy?  On the web, discussions of this parental concern are as plentiful as leftover candy corn.

Psychologists note that children younger than ten may be most vulnerable to Halloween’s horrors as they often have a hard time distinguishing the real and the not real: A kindergartner may be truly terrified of the zombie lurching at her, even if beneath the undead trappings it’s only jolly Uncle Fred.

According to one web report, Penn State psychologist Cindy Dell Clark found that most parents underestimate just how terrifying the holiday can be for young kids. “Intriguingly, Halloween is a holiday when adults assist children in behaviors taboo and out of bounds,” Clark writes in the anthropological journal Ethos. We parents might wring our hands the other 364 days of the year about how to most tactfully discuss the passing of a beloved goldfish, but on Halloween the doors of the crypt are flung wide open.  “It is striking that on Halloween, death-related themes are intended as entertainment for the very children whom adults routinely protect,” concludes Clark.

The pendulum, to use an Edgar Allen Poe trope, may be swinging the other way. Last Halloween, the New York Times reported a growing number of schools are banning offensive–or just plain frightening–get-ups: “In a school district in Illinois, students are being encouraged to dress up as historical characters or delicious food items rather than vampires or zombies,” the author notes, while a California school forbids “horror characters” and costumes that are “scary.”  Thumbs up for Dorothy and Toto, I guess, thumbs down for flying monkeys.  (Here’s a link to one therapist’s tips for further defanging the holiday.)

Certainly some parental pushback may be in order—on the haunted streets of my own childhood, I might encounter a toilet-paper mummy or a bed-sheet ghost, Marimekko tag still showing.  Now, exciting breakthroughs in Halloween technology mean that blood flows, geyser-like from foreheads; deathlike masks (size child X-small) feature rotting flesh dangling over empty eye sockets;  realistic machine guns are toted in the same small hands as plastic pumpkins.

Other experts  argue that being scared in the safe ways Halloween allows is actually good for (older) kids. It lets them practice being brave, a rare opportunity in the modern child-proof world.  “When children witness the scary things in life, they can examine these emotions and by doing so gain some power over them,” argues horror writer Reece Shearsmith. “Horror stories offer a playground in which children, and adults, can play at fear. There is nothing wrong with being scared. It’s a survival response.”

So don’t make your preschooler tour that Jason-themed Haunted House because you think it might be “fun.”  But, for older kids, I hope there is still room for that frisson of fear I remember so deliciously.  In those precious hours pumpkins glowed on stoops, our familiar neighborhood became strange and, yes, haunted.  The dark streets, the crackle of dry leaves under my curled witch shoes, a sidewalk suddenly and mysteriously empty—then an unearthly sound just behind me.

Halloween should remain a treat for kids’ imagination, or maybe a trick—Wait… did something just move behind that tree?

Photo of my handsome son, Ethan. Halloween 2009.

It’s “Turnoff Week” (September 19-25^th)–a national effort to get families to turn off their TVs and computer screens and see what life is like amidst the sudden quiet.  My own family recently went cold turkey, a challenging but illuminating week (OK, five days)  in which I bravely denied my 13-year-old daughter her regular hits of Facebook and hid our Wii controller–assumed as crucial to life as an insulin pump–from my shocked 9-year-old son.

I described our experience–good and bad–in a recent article for FamilyFun, which you can read here.

For me, the week was a chance to wrestle with my gnawing concern that even the best “educational ” media–the DVD on dinosaur extinction, the chess skills computer program–may be robbing my kids of the  benefits of the dust-mote-watching downtime of my own unstimulating childhood.  When I was young, we had one grainy TV whose standard fare was nature programs about bison at the watering hole, narrated by a Lunesta-voiced old man. Reading Jane Eyre for fun or wandering out in the backyard to make things with leaves seemed like attractive alternatives. Instead, my kids must cope with the siren song of laptops and X-boxes that offer infinite amusements, click click click.

There is growing evidence that downtime and even a little–shudder–boredom is actually good for growing minds. As Sarah Davies, author of the Unplug Your Kids blog, told me “As parents, we are afraid of boredom, but from boredom comes creativity.”–the free time to daydream, fantasize, and ponder Abe Lincoln’s face in the clouds. In its recent cover story on the creativity crisis, Newsweek noted that American children’s “creativity quotient” (or CQ) has been steadily declining since 1990 and cited kids’ growing TV and video game hours as a possible factor in the slump.

All the hours spent watching YouTube videos of hamsters may even be robbing kids of the space to develop their own sense of identity, a crucial task of growing up, as Dr. Michael Rich just noted in his fine blog, “Ask the Mediatrician” “When scientists placed research subjects in MRI machines to study brain activity, they saw that specific, task-oriented parts of the brain were activated when subjects were applying their focused attention to a problem,” he writes. “But it was between experiments– when the subjects were relaxing and ‘not thinking about anything in particular’ when scientists saw a large network of other neurons activate…..These apparently random thoughts are actually where we develop, fine tune, and try out our sense of ‘self.’”

Though there were groans and laments of deprivation, I did notice my own kids’ creativity blossoming during our screen-free experiment and would encourage other parents to try it too—for a week, or even just a day.  If you’re looking for some creativity-inspiring activities to fill in the now-idle hours, check out Davies’  Unplug Your Kids blog. Then go ahead…turn off your computer.

Photo: Sumanth Garakarajula/Flickr Creative Commons

Did you unplug at home? Please share your experiences below…….

A lazy July afternoon here, and from my backyard lawn chair, I’m watching a rare moment of sibling harmony. My kids, Hannah, age 13, and Ethan, age 9, are busily constructing a swimming pool out of the cardboard boxes our new patio set just emerged from. In his tie-die swim trunks, Ethan is kneeling in what was the table’s former box, sloshing around a rising tide of bone-chilling hose water. Hannah has just soaked a smaller box so it’s pliable enough for her to bend into a crude slide. Never mind that this pool would not pass code, the project has both kids transfixed. Hannah pauses briefly in her work to consider even greater design possibilities: “Can we buy a new dishwasher too?”

You don’t need to send the kids to chess camp to ensure summer enrichment, I concluded. Just buy a large consumer product and toss the packaging in the yard.

So it was with great interest that I came across Rebecca Mead’s latest piece in the July 5^th New Yorker, “State of Play.” In it, she describes a brave new world of playgrounds, built to exercise kids’ brains, not just their bodies.  The flagship of the emerging genre is a seven million dollar “Imagination Playground,” designed by architect David Rockwell and set to open later this summer at New York’s South Street Seaport.

Unlike at a traditional playground, there are no monkey bars, swings, or jungle gyms.  Instead, the main attraction is hundreds of “loose parts”—lightweight blue blocks made from molded foam that resemble giant Tinkertoys, according to Mead. Kids can use them to build structures, vehicles, water channels, and whatever else their imaginations dictate.  (There will also be lots of water and sand, two materials that theorists consider ideal ingredients for fostering creative play.)  ”The playground is intended to encourage something like the spontaneous free play that is offered by a demolition site,” writes Mead. “Minus the rock throwing and forcible impounding of participants.” (Check out the Imagination Playground website here for videos of the playground construction and more photos of kids at play with the big blue blocks.)

The Imagination Playground’s design invites kids to engage in creative play, undirected by adults—a crucial skill that today’s over-programmed and hyper-parented kids have less and less chance to develop. (“Play Workers” will be on hand to facilitate and to defuse bossy parents who want to play foreman.) The set up  also offers kids a chance to practice such essential social skills as collaboration and sharing: What happens if five of you want to use the same foam noodle? What do you do if a new kid asks to work on your space ship too?

Of course, there will always be a need for the good old let-off-steam “4-S” playgrounds-swings, sandboxes, seesaws, and slides—especially in our time of increasing child inertia. But these new playgrounds seem like a brilliant complement. I know my 9-year-old son in particular would love it if an Imagination Playground came to our town—he’s a tinkerer by nature.

Plus it would save us from having to buy a new dishwasher, just for the box.

Photo of Imagination Playground blocks from imaginationplayground.org

In my last entry here, I indulged in much hand-wringing over the fact that my book-crazy husband and I were raising a reluctant reader. So it was with great relief that I recently came across a new study suggesting that simply growing up among teetering stacks of tomes on every flat surface just might be enrichment enough.

Published in the June issue of Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, a 20-year cross-cultural study found that kids growing up in homes filled with books attain on average  3 years more schooling than children from bookless homes—a stat that held surprisingly true regardless of their parents’ education, occupation, and class.  A 500-book home library offered the same educational advantage as did having university-educated compared to drop-out parents, the study found.

In other words, throw out “Baby Einstein” and just buy another bookshelf.

According to researcher Professor  Mariah Evans of the University of Nevada, Reno, having as few as 20 books in the home still has a significant impact on propelling a child to a higher level of education, and the more books you add, the greater the benefit. “You get a lot of ‘bang for your book’,” she says.

It sure makes me want to slip my kids an extra twenty  for the book fair. But what is it about having books around that works this magic? I used the critical thinking and sense of inquiry I can now attribute to growing up in a house stuffed with first-edition Hemingways to email  her and ask.  She told me that, having clearly established that books have such a huge influence on educational attainment, answering  such Whys is the next step in their research. “We are currently investigating questions about the timing of reading (we suspect that reading aloud with toddlers and young children is particularly important, but have not yet firmly demonstrated this), about role modeling effects (noticing that parents read, noticing that they “look things up” when questions of fact arise, etc), and about the content of the books [themselves.] “

The study looked at data collected over the past two decades, and I have to wonder if children will get the same benefit from growing up in homes whose parents store their libraries on one slim Kindle.  Will the kids be tempted to curl up in the tree house with a box of saltines and an electronic reader in the same way?  My hunch is there will always be something about the pleasing heft and comforting smells of actual books that remains most inviting. Living among them helps kids befriend them for life—even if it means there is never any spare room on the coffee table for an actual coffee cup.

Do you have so many books at your house you need call numbers? Did you grow up with books piles everywhere?  I’d love to hear all about it in the comments section below.

Photo of Ethan by K. Morgan Photograhy

At age seven, my son Ethan was a perfectly competent reader. One evening, he demonstrated his skill while studying his father’s DVD collection. Ethan eyed one of the cases, eyebrows raised, then pleaded, “Can we watch Marathon Man? It has a ‘villain’ and it’s ‘Rated R’!”

The problem: Aside from enforced recitals of Zany Zebra and the other texts required to cut it as second grader, Ethan never willingly picked up a book. “I hate reading!” he’d insist while tinkering with his latest Home Alone-inspired invention involving dental floss and weaponized play dough.  He ignored the juicy Speed Racer novelizations I left around like cheese for an unsuspecting mouse. “It’s soooo boring,”  he would sigh, then brighten, “How much money is a Nintendo DS?” 

His words were like little knives to my heart for me, a book snob. Our decorating scheme is Modern Library: Piles of books cover our coffee table, radiators, stair landings. From the time his umbilical stump fell off, we’d shared with Ethan black and white board books designed to get his neurons pumping. His father and I had read aloud The Napping House to the point of our near-asphyxiation. All this had seemed to do the trick with his older sister, Hannah: When she was Ethan’s age, she loved nothing better than wiling away the hours reading about Laura Ingalls’ escapades with a pig bladder. Where had we gone wrong?

After some light Googling, I learned there was a term for the situation that was causing me such parental angst. Ethan was a “reluctant reader“–a child who’d mastered the basic skills but simply wasn’t interested. He appeared to have lots of company: I found grim statistics suggesting that reading for pleasure was an endangered pastime, that libraries of the future would be empty except for a snaking line of patrons waiting to check their email.

Still, I resolved to do what I could to give nurture a fighting chance, and started–yes–reading all I could about encouraging a love of books.  I’d assumed reading was like toilet training—once a child mastered the basic skills, I was off the hook. Wrong I was, according to Jim Trelease’ best-selling The Read Aloud Handbook, which sings the praises of the practice for all ages and abilities—even for teenagers. “Every time we read aloud to a child,” writes Trelease, “we’re giving a commercial for the pleasures of reading.” My reading aloud again, I gathered, would help Ethan focus on the fun of books—the allure of a cool character, a silly line of poetry, his mother’s chuckling—rather than the effort of reading itself.

My first selection was the literary equivalent of crack cocaine: The Thing at the Foot of the Bed, ghost stories that had rapturously terrified me as a child and whose pen-and-ink drawings still give me chills. A light rain helpfully pelted the windows as I read aloud from the “funny” ones. Ethan repositioned the book to peek nervously at the illustrations. “Don’t read him the scary ones!” warned Hannah, who’d joined us in the pool of lamplight and pronounced Ethan too young to be hearing about wailing ghost babies and missing golden arms. The next evening, Ethan found me loading the dishwasher. “So now can we read the scary ones?” he asked.

Not all my choices were so successful. Only a few pages into The Phantom Tollbooth, Ethan started playing distractedly with a cushion zipper and pronounced my beloved childhood favorite, “dumb.” I sighed and abandoned it for Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator.  Ethan, a gadget guy, was hooked right away by the mechanics of the space-bound elevator.

So Ethan and I didn’t always agree on what constitutes a great book, and I learned that was natural. “I could no more pick the book that would invite a whole class to make friends with reading than I could decide who my students should grow up and marry,” writes Nancie Atwell, author of The Reading Zone, who regularly teaches her school full of rural Maine children to become enthusiastic readers by having them read lots of compelling titles they choose themselves. I heard from other parents, too, that discovering one special book or series—Magic Treehouse, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, the original Wizard of Oz series—had turned the key for their kids.

I couldn’t just dump a batch of Caldecott winners onto Ethan’s bed and expect he’d dig right in. In searching out a title he’d find irresistible enough to read on his own, I decided to make use of Ethan’s obsession with jellyfish, begun after a close encounter on Long Island Sound a few summers ago. I ordered up a few well-reviewed titles on the topic, and then passed him the mail-order box with his name on it. Ethan sat down and read (the admittedly slim) Jellies cover to cover. “They have no brains,” he marveled, snapping the book shut.

Days later, I came upon Ethan and a friend on a break from amputating each others limbs with light sabers. They were pouring over Jellies together. Oreo crumbs drifted down onto the pages as Ethan pointed out the deadly Box Jellyfish. Snacks, conversation—it looked like a book club to me.

My goal is to keep hunting down titles—fascinating fact collections, Star Wars adaptations—compelling enough to convince Ethan that what’s between a book’s covers is as worthy of his prodigious curiosity as the workings of our floss dispenser. [For book suggestions for your own young readers, check out the cool websites, planetesme.com, and guysread.com]  I’m hoping my son’s life-long relationship with books turns out to be a love story—even if, like the best ones, there are a few obstacles to overcome along the way.

Photos of Ethan by K Morgan Photography

Two years ago, my twin sons were doing their homework at the kitchen table. They were in second grade.

One son was writing out a report on a dinosaur called Parasaurolophus. The other was studying his “challenge words” for Friday’s spelling test; among these words were “unscrupulous” and “hospitality.”

Seeing my sons thunder away at their respective assignments triggered in me the proverbial gamut of emotions. (Emotions, you may notice, tend to travel in gamuts.) First and foremost, I was proud of the little guys, working so hard on tasks that seemed, to me, pretty advanced. So advanced, in fact, that as I reflected more and more on the assignments, I felt my attitude sink from pride to consternation to downright resentment.

“They’re in second grade!” I kept reminding myself. “Should school really be this hard? Should a seven-year-old honestly be expected to spell the word ‘unscrupulous’—especially when he doesn’t even know what a ‘scruple’ is?”

For years, I’ve heard folks bemoan the “dumbing down” of America. And most of me understands their concern. But the rest of me wonders if, in our attempts to “smarten up” our kids, we’ve vastly overcompensated—and lopped off a chunk of their childhood in the process.

My son’s report on the Parasaurolophus perfectly encapsulates this concern. See, when I was a kid, there were only five dinosaurs: Tyrannosaurus Rex, Brontosaurus, Stegosaurus, Triceratops, and Pterodactyl. At least, those were the only ones anyone ever seemed to talk about. The Big Five—kind of like the vowels (with Diplodocus playing the role of “Sometimes Y”).

Now we’ve got all these new-fangled dinosaurs to contend with-Compsognathuses and Coelophyses and Troodons and, yes, Parasaurolophuses. (And for those of you who aren’t a paleontologist or a seven-year-old boy: a Parasaurolophus is a dinosaur with a tube-shaped crest on its head, which scientists suspect it used to breathe under water. It lived 65 million years ago—”during the Cretaceous period,” explained my second-grader.)

Am I saying we shouldn’t challenge our kids? Of course not. I’m a high school teacher, after all: I’m all for setting high standards. But I also can’t help but recall a conversation I had four years ago with my son’s kindergarten teacher, during the annual Parent-Teacher conference. She was reviewing the curriculum for us, and at some point, she said something about “all the material we had to cover this year”—a remark I still find curious.

This is still kindergarten, right? What exactly is all this “material” you have to cover? Quadratic equations, perhaps? The gases on the Periodic Table? The collected works of Thomas Pynchon?

Knowledge is power, sure, but don’t forget: in many myths, gaining knowledge also marks the end of the innocence. To me, kindergarten is all about getting your ABCs down, playing with clay, and learning to work well with others. Everything else can wait.

Of course, I’m saying this in the face of overwhelming evidence that suggests I have no idea what I’m talking about. My Dinosaur Son, it turned out, chose to do his report on Parasaurolophus; he loved (and still loves) learning all the hard names. And my Spelling Test Son came home the next week with a 112% on his test. To this day, both of them seem unscathed by the experience.

And my “they didn’t have these dinosaur when I was a kid” rant is, naturally, completely unfounded. Not long after my son did his Parasaurolophus report, I went to our local library and located the oldest kiddie dinosaur book on the shelf: Bernard Most’s 1978 picture book, If the Dinosaurs Came Back. The book, filled with illustrations of bright purple and yellow dinosaurs moseying through the city, is probably targeted for four- to eight-year-olds. Sure enough, on the last page, they had a list of dinosaurs—not just the Big Five, but Parasaurolophus and Compsognathus and all those other “new” reptiles which apparently aren’t new at all.

I don’t care. I’m still going to keep thinking about that mythical Simpler Time-when kindergarten kids played with clay, and there were only five dinosaurs.

 Photo: Kevitivity/Flickr Creative Commons

Here in Northern Indiana, the first snow delights my kids. Whether a foot or an inch falls, Hannah and Ethan race out the back door to make snow angels or scrape a precious millimeter or two off the patio table to concoct the first homemade slushy of the season. The whitewash allows my kids to see their everyday world anew: Our swing set, ignored the rest of the year by my now 8-and 12-year olds, has been magically transformed overnight into a thrilling toboggan run.  Animal tracks spell secret messages in the snow.

 But winter continues and the Lake Effect sets in. It snows again. And again. Or it gets too cold to snow. “It’s too freezing to go out,” Ethan will complain, preferring to warm his hands by our laptop. “There’s nothing fun to do outside anyway,” sighs Hannah peering out the window at the now grey-tinged snow, eyeing a little plume of last fall’s dirty newspaper sticking out through the hardened crust. Our backyard is no longer Narnia.

One midwinter morning, however, Ethan noticed a grackle clutching the iced limb of our hawthorn tree. “He looks cold,” he said.  ”I want to bring him inside,” added Hannah. We worried aloud about how a creature with paper-thin feathers and no hat was handling our tough Midwestern winter.  I was moved by my kids’ empathy, their ability to put themselves in the grackles’ shoes—or rather, lack of shoes. I suggested we install a feeder to help the birds cope.

For our first attempt, we bought a festive wreath of pressed seeds at the supermarket and lashed it to the fence post outside our window. The next morning we found only a few remaining sunflower hulls and suety clumps scattered on the ground below—the local squirrels must have formed a committee and carried the wreath off, Lilliputian-style. Undeterred, we hung a metal feeder high in our bay window and filled it with a special squirrel-unfriendly blend spiced with cayenne pepper, which birds don’t seem to mind.

Watching birds come for breakfast outside the glass now gave us something cheery to do as we sat over our own bowls of steaming oatmeal. Our first visitors were shy, frenetic little brown birds, who preferred their meals to go: They would corkscrew their necks around, Exorcist-style, to grab a bite from the dispenser, then rocket off. “There’s one now!” Hannah or Ethan would call—concocting an impromptu game of Now You See It, Now You Don’t.

One morning, a few weeks into our new project, I spotted a dazzling red splash: the first cardinal had alighted on our feeder. His brilliant vermillion morning coat made him look like a celebrity amongst the dowdy brown birds. “He’s so pretty!” exclaimed Hannah.

Getting out our bird book later, we read that the cardinal, the state bird of Indiana, lives here throughout the year. We must have missed him in other seasons, camouflaged by the sere of fall’s leaves, the lush greens of summer. Only on the icy blank canvas of winter did we spot his beauty.

Cardinal photo by: geopungo /Flickr Creative Commons

The Tooth Fairy is buzzing right now, thanks to the just-released movie.  I confess I have not seen it: The pleasure of sitting next to my silent kids in the dark, working on a nice transfatty high, is outweighed by the prospect of watching some bruiser once called The Rock stuffed into a tutu, preaching to me about the power of following one’s dreams.

Our staying home may all be to the good, anyway-and not just because Raisinets are tooth enamel’s greatest enemy. Rather than allowing Disney to brand her for all eternity, the tooth fairy is perhaps  best left to the imagination. (I would have cast Tinkerbell, not Julie Andrews, in the role, anyway.) The mysterious tooth fairy offers fertile ground indeed for young imaginations. Santa is known to have reindeers, elves, a wife, a deadline, even a street address: The tooth fairy only has pocket change. Where does she live? What does she do with the teeth she collects? How does she get into your bedroom unseen? Why did she leave a dollar for that eyetooth you swallowed whole?  All these details need to be limned by young believers.

It may come as no surprise that there’s a brain trust out there hard at work studying children’s beliefs in the tooth fairy. In an often quoted study, psychology professor Jacqueline Wooley found that 65 percent of 5-year-olds believed, dropping to 25 percent by age 9. (While kids can make the distinction between real and not real at age three, the following years are spent weighing evidence pro and con for their belief: The coin under the pillow vs. the naysaying know-it-all in homeroom.) In Flights of Fancy, Leaps of Faith: Children’s Myths in Contemporary America, psychology professor Cindy Dell Clark devotes a chapter to explicating  the Tooth Fairy, including documenting the lengths parents go to encourage their children’s beliefs. (One parent described her practice of writing notes to her children in teensy script; A boy speculates that the tooth fairy resides in a dentist-office drawer.)

What’s at stake, besides a few crisp bills with drool marks?  The tooth fairy is a player in the new thinking about children’s imagination that’s been percolating in the past decade or so. Fantasy, such as a belief in the wee winged one, was once considered largely frivolous, a childish thing to be put away when the “real world” of adulthood came along.     

In fact, the new thinking goes, the ability to imagine something unseen and untouchable  is a crucial tool in our understanding of the real world around us. “Whenever you think about the Civil War or the Roman Empire or possibly God, you’re using your imagination,” Paul Harris, a development psychologist and professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, told Shirley S. Wang of the Wall Street Journal .” The imagination is absolutely vital for contemplating reality, not just those things we take to be mere fantasy.”  By this logic, the iPad was possible because humans had the ability to imagine something that didn’t exist…yet.

Over the past decade, the tooth fairy has been a frequent visitor to our house. She only stopped coming this year, around the time my youngest turned eight—just as Wooley might have predicted.  (Ethan believed that the tooth fairy used his cast-offs to make fanciful constructions: a kind of carbon-based LEGO, I guess.)  Instead of making money off this commodity, we are now forking over huge sums to the orthodontist. 

When Ethan found a stash  of baby teeth deep in a bathroom cabinet recently, I was able to use my vivid imagination—honed, I now understand, through my own childhood fantasies—to offer immediate reply. “Yes, those are your baby teeth!” I parried. “I sometimes used to find them in the grass in the morning. The tooth fairy’s bag must have ripped.”

Photo: Robert S. Donovan

Let’s talk teeth. How do you and yours envision the tooth fairy? What’s the going rate for teeth in your neighborhood?