Children Are No Longer Imaginative Creatures With Magical Thinking

The cute little guy was playing with his robot dog outside my hotel room. When I stepped out for coffee, I looked down and said,

“What a cute doggie. What’s its name?”

The adorable tyke with dark, tousled hair looked up, thought a moment and answered, “Johnny.”

“That’s a great name for a dog,” I remarked, and headed to the coffee. A few steps away, I heard a little voice call after me,

“It’s a robot.”

I should have acted surprised, but he caught me off guard. Instead, I smiled and said, “I know.”

He went back to playing.

. . .

This wasn’t my first encounter with the fact that I still like to suspend disbelief and flow with the magic. Unlike modern children who have morphed into tiny adults when I wasn’t looking.

I was in Orlando waiting for my then-husband who was presenting a seminar in another city. We were meeting there that evening, but I had the whole day free.

I spent it at Disney World.

I grew up lower middle-class. Disney World and Disney Land didn’t happen for my family until the grandchildren came along.

This time in Orlando was before I had my own child, so I took myself to Disney World and Epcot Center.

My time there was — shall I say it — magical.

I rode as many rides as I could, including the 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea submarine ride. I sat next to an 8 year-old boy and his father.

As the submarine “submerges” the first thing we see through the portholes is a large school of iridescent fish. They mesmerize me. I turn to the child next to me and ask, “Aren’t the fish beautiful?”

He answered pointing,

“See the strings? That’s how they swim.”

Sigh.

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When did children stop believing in magical things? When did they become so logical and pragmatic?

I clung to the Santa Claus belief until I learned about sex. The two had nothing in common, it was simply the happenstance of age. As in, I was too old to still nurture a belief in the jolly old man who came down a chimney we never had.

We did have a life-size cardboard chimney my mother brought out of storage every Christmas. It worked for me.

I was an inquisitive child, but I didn’t question my mother on all the mystical folklore of childhood. She “believed”, so I did. Simple. Easy. That and curiosity about everything else created in me a vivid imagination, and birthed a writer.

If children can no longer pretend that a robot dog is an actual dog, as I pretended my imaginary horse family were real horses who followed me everywhere, then where will we get tomorrow’s writers?

If behind every Disney ride children see the “strings” and understand the technology that moves the robots and other Audio-Animatronic figures, what will we need to create to awe in them and inspire them?

I was awed by the Epcot Center feature, “Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln” when he was just a hydraulic operated, nearly stiff figure. And I was an adult.

Autonomatronics is a registered trademark for a more advanced Audio-Animatronic technology, also created by Walt Disney Imagineers.

The original Audio-Animatrons used hydraulics to operate robotic figures to present a pre-programmed show. This more sophisticated technology can include cameras and other sensors feeding signals to a high-speed computer which processes the information and makes choices about what to say and do. In September 2009, Disney debuted “Otto”, the first interactive figure that can hear, see and sense actions in the room. Otto can hold conversations and react to the audience.

In December 2009, Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln returned to Disneyland using the new Autonomatronics technology.

If I go back to see the new Audio-Animatronic characters at Disney World and Epcot Center, will the children be little engineers and computer whizzes who explain to me how Audio-Animatronics work? No doubt.

Will I still be awed and amazed? Also no doubt.

. . .

What can we do to stimulate children’s imagination? Enter into their imaginary worlds when they are very young. Play with them. Read to them. Make up stories to tell them, and ask them to make up stories and tell them to you.

My mother, along with her “beliefs” in all the mystical creatures, did that for us. She made us writers, including the one who can build computers from scratch. There’s no reason children can’t be engineers and creators of magic too. We only have to believe in them.

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This post was previously published on New Choices.

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