Friday, November 16, 2007

Fun and imaginative or scheming and lying?

I belong to a local parents' group and this morning I received a post about the "House Fairy". As an artist who is a parent that loves fairies I had to check out the link to this website. www.housefairy.org

After reading around the site and watching the video I feel a little smarmy. Its the same challenge I have with the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus. My kid is smart and she asks very direct questions and makes clear deductions and I don't want to be caught lying to her. This past Easter she already said to me "Mom, there is no Easter Bunny, is there?" She was 3!!! I sort of skirted the question neither lying to her nor all the way answering her. I can't remember what I said, but I think I just asked her to consider what she thought about it.

So, here is my question, if I were to employ this tactic Lexee will eventually realize that there is no House Fairy or that the House Fairy is Mom. Will she think that I deceived her or will she think that it was a fun motivator?

6 comments:

  1. When I cut and paste that housefairy address I don't get anything. :(
    But I will tell you, I always knew what was fact and what was fiction and what was just for fun.
    I always knew that some adults require a lot of humoring and you really need to act like you believe in Santa or the Easter Bunny for them. And being a child I assumed everyone knew what I knew, so it was actually a revelation to me at 5 when I first came to understand there were kids who were not just humoring the adults, but in fact believed in Santa.
    Fun is fun. Pretending for fun seems fine.

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  2. ooops! try www.housefairy.org

    I do see what you're saying, though. "Pretending" is a word that is not really in our vocabulary around here... I need to keep that in mind...

    Thank you for your always wise perspective! ;)

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  3. I will also say that when my child said "Tell me for really, really, really, real is there a Santa" I said "No" because I wanted her to be 100% sure that "Tell me for really, really, really, real" would always be responded to with the truth. (And that truth and trust are much more precious than any holiday tradition.)
    You know your kid. You're cool.

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  4. This is funny - so my kid accumulated a bunch of STUFF this afternoon while she was resting and I wanted her to clean it up and she was being resistant. So, I told her to come over by me and I got really quiet and I told her that I had gotten a note from the House Fairy. And she was already skeptical and responded with her face all contorted and said... "what's a HOUSE FAIRY?"??? I told her that a house fairy is someone who checks in on kids to see if they have good "clean up" skills and she mentioned that she has been noticing that you are pretty messy. She gave me this "yeah right" sort of look so I asked her if she wanted to see the House Fairy. I showed her one video and Lexee was leaping off the sofa to go clean her room!

    I'm going to have to get some little "prizes" to leave behind. The video we watched or song we heard said something about cleaning up at night so she thought now would be a good time and that I should hurry up and make an appointment with the House Fairy so that she can come and check Lexee's room tonight!

    We'll see where this goes, but she got a kick out of it and its kind of a fun take...

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  5. Ok, guys, I guess I was really stupid or something. I TOTALLY believed in Santa, etc. when I was a kid!! I agree that nothing is wrong at all with make-believe and that pretending is just plain fun.

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  6. I was right there with you, Laura. I bought it hook line and sinker. My Mom loves xmas so much that even when we stopped believing in Santa we had to keep that from my Mom or else we wouldn't get stockings... we still get stockings to this day!

    Ali and Lexee on the other hand are "different" or "special" as I like to say! ;)

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jul