What Is Brave?

I have a kid who is afraid to watch movies. Some kids are afraid of the dark, some kids are afraid of dogs. I used to work in an indie bookstore that houses a highly refined, very friendly cat. One day two twin girls who were about three or four came in, saw the cat, and started screaming and crying inconsolably. Hard enough to make every adult who wasn’t their parent quietly giggle into their hand. The cat was insulted and left the room (which didn’t even ease the crying because He Was Still In The Building). Yeah, some kids are afraid of cats. Some don’t like clowns or spiders or costumed characters. My kid fears the silver screen. She’s patient enough to watch a 90-minute movie but says that she always ends up dreaming about movies after she watches them. And suspenseful movies scare her because she worries too much about the characters.

Suspenseful here is a relative term. When she was very small, she didn’t like Milo and Otis, the story of a cat and a pug dog who accidentally get lost and have a long journey back home. It’s a nice little movie with no human actors, just live action animals who “talk.” But when Milo (or was it Otis? Anyway, the cat) is on a raft and a bear is lurking about, my daughter was in tears because she worried the bear was going to get the cat. When we saw Arthur Christmas (in which Santa’s younger son manages to save the day), she spent the entire movie worried that the little girl wouldn’t get her Christmas present. We were fine with Matilda until the principal showed up. Finding Nemo? Forget it. Between the sharks and the lampfish, she didn’t make it through the first half hour.

My daughter and I have talked about how the hero in a movie always has a problem she or he has to work through. She knows this intellectually, but she also knows that images from the movie are going to stay with her and make it hard to sleep. Her simple solution is not to watch the movie in the first place. Plato said “Know thyself.” She knows herself. That’s pretty good for a seven-year-old.

Whether it’s a movie or a novel or a picture, every story is a journey in which the main character goes somewhere or does something and, one hopes, is changed in the process. My daughter’s journey has taken her from an orphanage half a world away to a family with two parents who are crazy about her, a couple of stupid dogs who think she’s another big puppy, and extended family and friends who think she’s the cat’s pajamas. She’s a brave little kid. It may sound funny to say “My child is brave” when she’s too scared to watch a movie. But the list of things that scare her is much shorter than the list of things that don’t scare her. She is brave enough to swim in the deep end of the pool. She is brave enough to go up to a girl she doesn’t know at the playground and ask if she wants to play. She is not afraid of the dark, the school bus, new foods, new places, or the lion in the Chinese lion dance. She is brave enough to touch and talk about the dead robin we found buried in the back yard. She is brave enough to talk to a friend whose father just died. She is brave enough to ask questions about her birth parents and accept that we don’t have many firm facts to give her.

If you happen to have a child with an irrational fear of, say, cats (or dogs or asparagus), don’t sweat it. I’m not going to attempt to use this piece to teach you how to make your kid brave because we all have something that scares us. Just remember that the list of things that doesn’t scare us will always be longer.

–by Susan Petrone

Tales from the Kid Planet

I had a girls’ night out the other evening with my daughter, who just turned seven. We ate Indian food and she told me about the goings on in first grade. At one point (okay, a few points) during our meal, she started making up words (we had a pretend conversation in babble), and a  couple other times she kind of spaced out, staring at people in the restaurant, or just got silly.

At one point when she was being a total goof, I asked: “What planet are you from anyway? The Kid Planet?”

“Yes. That’s where I go sometimes.”

“Like when I tell you to put on your shoes and socks in the morning and ten minutes later you’re in your room, barefoot, singing to yourself and coloring, that’s where you go?”

“Yes,”

I heard a lot of details about the Kid Planet. I used to call it the Six-Year-Old Planet, but then she had a birthday. And as I discovered, it’s really for all kids, not just six-year-olds. Nobody lives there because, she tells me, “There aren’t any bedrooms,” but kids go there sometimes during the day when they appear not to be listening to the adults. There’s a quiet room and a noisy room, a swimming pool that is 2/3 the length of the pool at our local YMCA (she was very clear about this). Actually there are two pools–one for swimming to burn off little kid energy and one for playing. My kid goes to both. And there’s another room where kids can just go and run around and burn off energy.

“What about babies?” I asked. “Do they go to Kid Planet too?”

“Well, they’re in a separate building next door.”

“How old do the babies have to be before they can move up to the other building?”

“Like three or four.” My guess is that the babies are pretty much in the Baby Building on Kid Planet 24-7 with occasional excursions into our world. From what my daughter tells me, the move up to the Big Kid Building seems be based more on milestones and personal preference than strictly on age. Which makes sense because there are no adults on the Kid Planet, and I can’t see any of the kids actually making and enforcing rules. The whole thing seems to be a sort of anarcho-collective, which I find deeply appealing.

To get into the Kid Planet, my daughter told me that “You just go up to the gate and tell them your name, and then they let you in.” She says this will not work if you’re an adult. Little does she know.

Last year for Halloween, she dressed up as a Magical Creature. She had wings and antennae and ton of glow sticks attached to her clothes. She is an inventive, clever, kind, funny little person. To my mind, she is a magical creature every day.

People say that your kids keep you young. That’s physically impossible. We get older; they get older. So it goes. What our children do is remind us of the little people we once were, of the magical creatures we used to be. We were magical, you know. Those magical creatures are still in us, still part of us. They surface when we forget our adult selves and climb a tree, jump into a pile of leaves, or run through a sprinkler. In short, when our kids remind us of the glorious little people we once were.

The next time you’re in a meeting at work or letting your mind wander while you’re doing the laundry or the dishes or mowing the lawn, take a visit to the Kid Planet. Don’t be afraid. Go up to the gate and whisper your name. If you let yourself remember, they’ll let you in.

–by Susan Petrone