When I was a kid, I had a pet shark

Then my daughter one-upped me with a pet dinosaur

You’re about to understand this picture…

When I was a kid, I had a pet shark. He lived in the sewer outside our apartment. My brother and I fed it everyday. He ate the rocks we dropped through the grate. And sand. And grass. He was a hungry shark. He was our friend.

Before you conclude that I had an odd and absurdly lonely young life devoid of toys or parental care, let me assure you it was the opposite. We pulled the entire neighborhood into our delusion about Sharky. Together, in our Toughskins and corduroys, we peered into the dark cavern and swore we saw ripples as he swam. We squealed with delight over a popping air bubble. Kids carried rocks from their gardens to offer Sharky a tasty treat.

When my daughter was a kid, she had a pet dinosaur. His name was Norbert. He lived in the enchanted forest that bordered our backyard. My mom told her all about him and showed her exactly where the forest began.

To take it up a notch, my mom had my step-father make a wooden dinosaur foot on a stick and instructed me to use it after bedtime to impress footprints in the dirt leading to the enchanted forest. My daughter happened upon those tracks and ran to the phone to tell Grandma. A visit to Grandma’s house meant a peek at the dinosaur egg in her freezer. “For safekeeping,” she told my daughter with a wink. When my daughter admitted that her friend couldn’t see the enchanted forest, my mother declared her friend to be one of the unlucky ones who’d simply misplaced her imagination.

But that feeling

I live in a town where cultures clash. Not in a newsworthy way, but in a way where the kids who don’t celebrate Christmas or Easter ruin Santa and the Easter Bunny for the kids who do. And kids who don’t believe in the Tooth Fairy, ridicule the ones who do. We can argue that tricking or lying to kids isn’t right, but I don’t frame it that way. Those parts of my childhood gave me magic to believe in and excitement to tap into. I still fully remember the wondrous feeling of finding Christmas gifts that appeared overnight, and believe me, it was a LONG time ago.

I admit, it takes extra work to keep the enchantment alive for your own children. It is my nature to be hyper-vigilant. Santa left hand-written letters coated in glitter; the Tooth Fairy delivered unusual $2 bills. All the extra care was 100% worth it to see that light in my daughters’ eyes—the beautiful light of imagination.

And why shouldn’t we preserve that? Do children not deserve innocence, even when that innocence comes with naiveté? Is it fair to lay truth and reality onto the tiny shoulders of little children and absolve them of all wild imaginings? I would much rather leave kids inside their robust imaginary world, creating awesome impossibilities we’ve long since stopped dreaming of. Their little minds are untethered and unencumbered, or at least they should be for a while. They deserve the freedom to color outside the lines and imagine without limits. Who are we to disconnect them from magic?

The Shift

You can almost watch the light dim in children. It used to happen to little girls sometime around age 11. They’d transform from worm-watching, unselfconscious kids into “tweens” who suddenly noticed themselves in mirrors and considered their hair and outfits. Now, it’s happening younger and younger thanks to technology.

My nine-year-old niece has a refrigerator of skin care products. When I was nine, Ivory soap was my skin care product. You can’t pull the errant thread and save the sweater though, because all her little friends are victims of the same incessant online marketing. Should nine-year-olds even realize they have skin to care for? Should boys of the same age be using pomade to perfect their floppy hair? Is anyone worried that these prepubescent kids are quadrupling their chemical load by using all these products, not to mention making them all fixate on their appearance?

Reality Bites

Reality comes at us all too fast—bills and obligations, jobs that suck dry any enthusiasm, deficient sleep, and not nearly enough fun.

My teenager lacks the urge to dive into adulthood. When I was her age I was positively desperate to have my own money, my own space, and agency around all life decisions. She feels none of these imperatives. “Why would I want to be an adult? So I can get up, work all day, cook and clean up, go to sleep and start again? Rarely see my friends. Get almost no down time? Have tons of bills? Why would I want that?”

Damn, girl.

I don’t have a good answer. I try to spin it. But in my heart, I know she’s right. Who designed life this way?

The five day workweek used to end. Now technology allows it to creep into our homes, our evenings, and our weekends. There are almost no boundaries anymore. A 20-something coworker of my husband’s declared she doesn’t answer calls after 7pm or on the weekend-- and the rest of the team thinks she’s being radically unreasonable. She’s not the unreasonable one.

It’s no wonder people are depressed, unhealthy, and unhappy. There’s no time to play. If you’re a working parent, prepare to fully surrender your weekends if your child plays a sport. You will not again have a Mother’s Day or Father’s Day without a sports tournament until they graduate. Who is this good for?

In NJ, there’s a county that still has “blue laws” which forbid retail businesses to be open on Sundays. Rather than respecting that practice as good for families (and the families of business owners), we all feel super frustrated that the traffic is so unreasonable on Saturdays. “Freakin’ blue laws!” we say as we inch along, bumper to bumper to get our shopping done.

Church? A day at the park? Lazing around with a book? No, no, no. We have to push, be productive, get to Costco, meal prep for the week. Our busyness is insidious. This is what the kids are seeing. This is what the kids are rejecting.

Imagination dies without attention. You forget how to dream. You lose your ability to play. Or worse, the desire persists under a layer of resentment because there’s no time to put toward it. When was the last time you finger-painted with a kid? Played badminton? Swung on a swing? Made up a story about the shapes of clouds? Gave a secret life to a stuffed animal? Fed a shark in a sewer? Found a dinosaur egg?

What are we teaching kids about being a grown up if we grown-ups feel no agency about our own lives and time? Somehow we get caught up and paint ourselves into a corner of obligations—financial and otherwise. Maybe we know it’s not what we want, but it’s also really, really hard to un-ring the bell. Some people do it. Most of us don’t.

Maybe this next generation will figure it out. Or maybe AI will swoop in and change things in such a wholesale way that they’ll have no choice but to adapt. When the whole system crashes, will they recreate a better one? Can they get back to magic? Can we return to valuing human imagination? Will we stop marching like ants and shunning the people who dare step out of line?

The pet sharks and dinosaurs can’t feed themselves.

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