Kids and the importance of imagination

July 2, 9:50 AMParenting Humor ExaminerAnnette van de Kamp

Although my kids ask for plenty of ridiculous things, I haven’t heard this one before. It’s always nice to discover new craziness, especially if it doesn’t come from your own kids. Makes you feel kind of superior, at least until you remember something awful your own children did recently.

Mendel has never asked for dangerous tools, nor does he need them. He has his hands.
Cute little boy hands, soft as velvet, and they can deliver blows and pinch your skin like there’s no tomorrow. When he was just a few months old, he used those adorable hands to yank clumps of hair out of my head, all the while staring lovingly into my tear-filled eyes.

More recently, he has convinced himself he knows Karate. “This is how you attack bad guys,” he says. He then lies flat on the floor and throws imaginary blows in the air, while screaming “Ah-I-Ya”! So far, he hasn’t tried it out on his sister, which –in spite of the fact that this child simply does not grow, and weighs 30 pounds dripping wet- would probably still hurt. He’d make sure of that; while he’s short on physical strength, he has strategy to spare.

Just as my friend is clueless about her son’s desire for a flamethrower, I don’t know where Mendel learned this pretend-karate. Even more puzzling is the notion of “bad guys”. Who are they, and how bad can they be if a little boy can so easily defeat them?
Come to think of it, Mendel, like most kids his age, has an imaginary friend. Logic dictates that he has imaginary enemies as well.

Mendel’s imaginary friend is allowed to operate independently; for example, he does all the naughty business Mendel gets accused of. He also has a name, and gets to interact with Mendel on a one-on-one basis. The bad guys, on the other hand, are nameless and faceless; they don’t really do anything but wait in the wings until Mendel feels the need to beat them up. They are sort of like extras on a movie set: underpaid, underappreciated, and more often than not lost during the final edit.

Let’s hope they won’t get so discouraged that they pack it in. They might decide to move to Mendel’s friend’s house, in which case they would come under attack from something much worse than a few karate chops. Which begs the question: if an imaginary enemy is attacked with an imaginary flamethrower, does it still hurt?

For more info on the importance of kids' imagination, visit suite 101,  Kids' corner, or go play at the imagination factory