Cultural AD/HD

drawingsforhumans:

keiren-smith:

ourvaluedcustomers:

To his friend while they looked at SPIDERMAN comics…

Aww—that’s actually kinda sweet (wonder how old the guy was?).  Years and years ago, my youngest son was wandering around (‘bout three years old at the time) with his arms outstretched, palms up and touching his palms with his middle finger. He looked absolutely perplexed and kept saying, “I don’t understand!” When I asked what was wrong he looked at me in confusion—still pushing his palms with his fingers—and announced, “I’m out of web fluid!!”.

When I was four my cousin told me Spider-Man wasn’t real and it was more devastating to me than Santa Claus or whatever. One of the first two songs I ever learned the words to was the 60s Spider-Man theme (the other was Hello my Baby… I watched a lot of old cartoons).

Awwww! And really how are kids supposed to know? We got called in to Kell’s grade 1 class once so that the teacher could tell us that she was disturbed by Kellam’s “lack of grasp on reality”. We were so startled and asked for an example—apparently—shocker here!!—he thought Jurassic Park was real, and that there was a Starship Enterprise running around space. Was the first time it occurred to me that we of course knew that all of this wasn’t real but hadn’t explained the concept of fiction to the kid. (and as you point out, it happens at the same time that a lot of parents are trying to convince them that Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the tooth fairy are real. Ty hated hated hated the concept of Santa so it was one we only loosely supported—given how many cousins the kids have we couldn’t actively negate it, but we didn’t give it any credence in our house).