Basically, I was always disappointed that the witches weren't real when we learned about the Salem witch trials.
A child's hope is that your father comes riding in on that white stallion and saves them. You can't make somebody love you the way you want them to love you, it's not a Leave it to Beaver type world. This isn't television. Life's a lot more cruel than that.
When a child first catches adults out -- when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not always have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just -- his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child's world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing.
Like a lot of kids, you kind of think baseball's boring - that's the perception.
I think Santa Claus is, by and large, quite beneficial, for when the child is finally allowed -- or forced -- to recognize the nonexistence of Santa Claus, then the child is able to go through the vital intellectual process of reconstructing reality in light of new evidence, complete with back-forming new stories to account for past events. This prepares the child for many other disillusionments and gives her vital and well-supported experience in maintaining her grip on reality independent of the stories told to her at any given time.
When you know your mom and dad are doing things that are not idyllic, as far as your desire to defer to a parental ideal, you start to see your parents as peers, perhaps, and that's not the healthiest thing at that early an age.
Do you remember when you found out there was no Santa Claus? I was so upset I didn't think I'd be able to do the show.
A father is a reality-concealing machine, a machine for dishing up lies to kids, and that isn't even the worst of it: secretly he believes that he represents reality.
Childhood is a promise that is never kept.
I used to believe my father about everything but then I had children myself & now I see how much stuff you make up just to keep yourself from going crazy.
And that was the greatest heartbreak of all- no matter how spectacular we want our children to be, no matter how perfect we pretend they are, they are bound to disappoint. As it turns out, kids are more like us than we think: damaged, through and through.
Unfortunately, kids are led to believe things are easier to achieve than they really are.
I was always the kid who wanted Christmas to not come, because I realized at a pretty early age that no matter what you got, there's always a little bit of a letdown. It's like, 'Oh, gee, I wanted two ponies, not one.'
One of the earliest religious disappointments in a young girl's life devolves upon her unanswered prayer for a horse.
Children, of course, don't understand at first that they are being cheated. They come to school with a degree of faith and optimism, and they often seem to thrive during the first few years. It is sometimes not until the third grade that their teachers start to see the warning signs of failure. By the fourth grade many children see it too.
I felt suddenly cruel, like I´d told dmall children there was no tooth fairy, that it was just their Mom sneaking into their room after they went to bed.
As a child who loved to read, I had trouble finding honest stories. I felt that adults were always keeping secrets from me, even in the books I was reading.
It's one of those unforgettable moments that happen as a child, when you discover that all along the world has been betraying you.
So one day my mother sat me down and explained that I couldn’t become an explorer because everything in the world had already been discovered. I’d been born in the wrong century, and I felt cheated.
You always think that a bolt of lightning is going to strike and your parents will magically change into the people you wish they were, or back into the people they used to be.
One of the saddest days of my life was when my mother told me Superman did not exist. I was like what do you mean he's not real. And she thought I was crying because it’s like Santa Claus is not real and I was crying because there was no one coming with enough power to save us.
When your parents split up, it's impossible to delude yourself about fairytale romance and happy endings.
We tell our kids that policemen are good and God protects us and our country is noble, and at a certain point - and for some it comes quite early, five or six years old - we start to realize that it's all a facade.
All innocent mechanisms are muddied up with experience. Children become less and less translucent. Layers of guile and suspicion grow. It's the law of paternal disenchantments.
