Karl Hadland wonders if his daughter’s innocence is gone.
Have you ever been in a situation where your child, out of pure innocence, has said or done something, and depending on your reaction you could potentially mess your kid up forever? OK maybe not forever, but your reaction as a parent is going to make something stay innocent or become taboo. I’ve always tried to not make a big deal of something when it comes to my kid’s innocence and purely not knowing something as what it means to adults. This story is a case of exactly this.
About two months ago, my wife and I were downstairs and our daughter was upstairs playing in her playroom before bedtime. As the clock approached eight, the two of us went upstairs to put her in bed and say goodnight. Had we known the mess we were about to walk into we would have prepared ourselves mentally and had a game plan, but of course we were clueless as to what was happening right above our heads.
As we walked upstairs, we noticed something strange out of the corner of our eyes. Above our stairs is a metal railing that goes around the upstairs playroom. Our daughter had all of her Barbies naked and tied by their wrists with hair ribbons all along the entire railing. I can’t tell you what my wife’s first thoughts were, but there was a quick second where I thought I had walked into an episode of the twilight zone and my worst nightmare had become a reality.
My wife did what she usually does when she is in a situation where she feels uncomfortable. She started laughing hysterically and fell to the ground, as I tried as hard as I possibly could to keep a straight face and pretend like there was nothing weird going on around us. I told our daughter it was bed time. My poor daughter, having not one clue as to why her mom was lying on the floor laughing, followed me to her bedroom. As she went into her room, I shut her door quickly and whispered to my wife, “Honey, keep a straight face. It won’t be weird unless we make it weird.” My wife, unable to gain control of her laughing, stayed outside the room giggling. I, as quickly as possible, told our daughter goodnight and gave her a kiss.
Upon putting her to bed, we went back to the naked Barbie mess to investigate what in the world our little girl had been doing. What we found was this:
A line of Ken Barbies and girl Barbies tied by their wrists and ankles. Some of which were on each other’s shoulders, tied backwards, and even some upside down. It was the equivalent of a snake pit where all you can see is parts of snakes entwined together.
Of course we spent the rest of the night conspiring to each other about whether we should discuss this with our daughter. We wondered if we should be worried. Really, we didn’t know how to feel and what should be done. After a couple hours of discussion, we agreed that it was nothing more than innocence, and in the morning I would casually bring it up and ask her what it was that she was doing.
The next morning, I casually brought it up and asked her, “What were you playing upstairs with your barbies last night? Did they all have their clothes off because you don’t know how to put them back on?”
She replied without any hesitation, “I was playing naked and locked in the dungeon.”
What!? I thought to myself. I had no response. All I could muster was, “Oh OK, was it fun?” Honestly there really was nothing I could have said. How do you respond to something like that?
In the end we decided to drop it and not bring it up again. We know our daughter and, to her little mind, it meant nothing more than exactly what she told me “I was playing naked and locked in the dungeon.” To her, there was nothing weird about that. She has no idea people do things like that in real life, and she is still grasping the fact that being naked is a taboo-type thing.
The moral of this severely odd and twisted story, as I’m sure a lot of you are thinking right now, is that simply, as parents, we should be aware that how we react to what our children do can greatly determine how they view something themselves.
There was a lot wrong with what my daughter was doing. But instead of sitting down and having a serious discussion with her about how wrong it is to tie people up naked in a dungeon, my wife and I simply decided that it was nothing more than a five-year-old expressing her innocence and playing with dolls. To her, it was nothing more.
She has not played that game since, and there has not been a reference to that game or anything involving that game since that day. Kids will be kids, and there will always be times when, out of their own pure innocence, they will do things that us parents and adults will think is weird, strange, and sometimes just wrong. But it is nothing more than a kid being a kid.
Originally appeared at NewAgeDads.com.
—Photo QuotableKidney/Flickr
About Karl Hadland
Yep, these are the parenting moments no one dreams of but everyone has! And yes, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
Hahahahahahahahaha.You should really email me. Hooboy!
All girls torture their Barbies at some point in their lives. It’s like a rite of passage.
Yes, on the Barbie torture. My kid would usually dismember hers within hours of getting them. Ignore.
I’m not so sure that children simply dream these things up from out of nowhere. Some parents allow their young children to hear the news, so she might have heard about ‘naked and locked in the dungeon’ from a friend who was talking about something they heard or saw on the news. I’m not saying you should have had a discussion about it, as that’s a judgment call for you to make. I would have asked where she got that idea from, at least.
Personally I would have asked more, like, ‘I haven’t seen you play this game before. It looks different. Mummy and I are curious. How do you play it?’, ‘Do the dolls enjoy playing that game?’, ‘How do they play it?’ and, ‘What are the dollies feeling and thinking about while they play?’. She may be processing through play some emotions, confusion, something she saw, heard of or experienced in some way, or something else. She may welcome your curiosity as a way of sharing this processing. Even if it’s all innocence this’ll add to the bedrock of trust in your relationship. As a mum who also gets giggle fits, I’d probably explain why I laughed in the most appropriate manner. Something like, ‘I thought they looked strange stuck there like bugs in a spider’s web. Strange things sometimes make me want to laugh.’ Asking where or who kind of questions can lead to making up answers As a process of play in story telling or may open the concern that there’s something wrong in her play. Just my thoughts.
As a father of two kids, one of each gender, I’ve had some of these moments (maybe none quite as ‘cinematic’ as the cited example), and I quite appreciate the way you handled it.
There are times when your parental spidey-sense suggests your child is working through something that requires your attention, while there other times where you get the sense they are simply looking for new ways to reshuffle the known pieces of their expending world to see what happens and what ‘rules’ are more ‘suggestions.’
The fact that the game never got played again, and ‘naked in a dungeon’ hasn’t come up again would suggest to me you stumbled on the latter. If it became part of a trend where all of her dolls were suddenly sans clothes or toy torture became her main source of fun, then you’d have noticed it and hopefully investigated deeper. Being sensitive to the difference is one of the most challenging, and most important things we do as parents. It’s the default assumption that it’s no big deal that leads to denial… and the unhappy fruits of that path.
You didn’t wig out and tell her it was “wrong” (making it rebellious or thrilling for her), nor did you make it a big deal so it became a recurring theme where she knew she could get a reaction. Asking a few questions to take her temperature seemed like the right steps to me.
One really helpful trick when the kids do things like this is to try to see – and hear what they say – with the eyes and ears of a 7-year-old, not the eye and ears of a grown-up. We have so much baggage, so much our mind will add to what is actually there, making it something else entirely.
My child came into the house asking for cardboard and a felt pen. I asked him what he was doing and he replied he was making a sign for his cathouse. Further inquiry led to the discovery of the small house he had built for the neighbor’s cat.
Hi!
I appreciated the way you handled that situation! I’m currently seventeen and a girl but I remember playing Barbie Murder Mystery and Barbie War. I read something by a child psychologist that Barbie Dismemberment and abuse is a common stage for young girls, so I guess nothing to worry about! My parents never addressed it and I’m quite okay!