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Angry Child with Mother
An angry girl mirrors her mother with arms crossed
“I'm gonna hit you,” my four-year-old daughter threatened coldly across a steamy plate of spaghetti.
I could have shot back a “No you're not!” or “If you hit me, it's to bed with no supper,” or some such threat, but I decided to wait it out. There's something comically absurd about a grown man staring down a cute, pony-tailed whippersnapper, but parenting is peppered with episodes of lunacy.
“I'm gonna hit you,” she reiterated, this time with more emphasis.
Still, I waited in silence. A few moments later she was aggressively masticating her spaghetti, and my stern stare had melted into a silly smile. It's fine if my daughter destroys her pasta instead of daddy's face.
A week later a mom and dad sat pensively in my office.
“Our seven-year-old son told us he wishes we were dead,” mom began sheepishly.
“It's not like him,” dad chimed in. “He's usually kind and loving.”
“So, what did you say back?” I asked.
“Well, we told him it's terrible to think or say such things and grounded him,” mom answered.
“I never talked to my parents that way,” dad added.
Me either, but I remember a time or two when I thought about them that way.
Do you think your son really wants you dead?” I continued.
Ugly Fantasies
They didn't. Most younglings don't harbor true homicidal intent, but they do entertain fantasies, lots of ‘em. And some of these fantasies are ugly, full of aggression, greed, pettiness, jealousy and all the other emotional monsters that sometimes inhabit the human heart.
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But even when they are nasty, fantasies are usually just that, fanciful, imaginary and harmless. Sure, most parents want their kids to have light, lovely and laughable fantasies, the kind that make childhood so wondrous, but the psyche, like the natural world, is a balance of light and dark, love and hate, construction and destruction.
Fantasy and play are the tools children use to work out their conflicts, frustrations and aggressions. Often it helps them avoid working things out on the neighbor kid's face. Still, a lot of us fear that fantasy creates reality, not only in children but also adults. We worry that aggressive fantasies will turn into aggressive behavior, and, on rare occasions, they do, but the warning signs are usually more obvious.
When I was an elementary student in what George Carlin called a “Catholic prison school,” that is precisely what I was taught— that fantasy is just a blink away from reality.
“If you think about committing a sin, then you have already committed one,” the nuns taught me in the shadow of a steel ruler.
The message? Bad thoughts merit the same onerous guilt and punishment as bad actions. I remember many a Saturday afternoon spent cowering in a confessional booth telling the priest all my “bad thoughts.” By the time I ran through that felony rap sheet, my actual sins seemed like petty misdemeanors.
I did a lot more lying, cheating, beating on people, smashing things and swearing in my imagination than in real life. The only harm suffered from my naughty fantasies was being forced to feel guilty about them.
So, is fantasy always harmless? Well, violent fantasies can precede violent acts, but that doesn't prove that fantasy causes destructive behavior, just that it sometimes accompanies it. As we love to say in my business, a correlation is not a cause.
And in most children and adults, the vast majority of nasty imaginings never crystalize into nasty actions. Rather, they predominantly act as release valves, purging destructive energies that might otherwise be inflicted on real flesh and blood folks.
When it comes to most kids most of the time, parents can take comfort in this adage.
The fantasy is not the fact.
