I knew that it would arrive some day – the era of telling stories, that is. While my daughter has been joking for a while and she tells stories all the time in her play, until now she has rarely tried to pass off these stories as truth.
Lately, though, there have been some wild and not-so-wild stories about happenings in our home. In our house, we close the bedroom doors when we are not around so that our cats won’t frolic on the beds while we are gone. Today I was graced with a story about how she’d left the door to her room open. Apparently the cat got in and had a party in her bed and the doll bed. According to my daughter, there was a mess all over the place. Cat hair everywhere! She had to clean it up. That’s how the room got a little messy.
Really? No, not really.
Now, I’m not too concerned. I know that four-year-olds are busy distinguishing between truth and fiction and discovering how to tell the difference. Can my daughter create truth by saying something is so? No, but it’s a good experiment to try. It’s an interesting concept, actually. If we could create reality by talking about it, wouldn’t it be an intriguing world?
We did have a discussion about lying today, though. It wasn’t an angry discussion, just a talk about how making up stories and passing it off as truth is confusing to other people, because other people don’t know that you’re making up a story. It’s better to use the phrase, “Imagine if…” when you’re creating a story. While I am sure that the wild tales will continue and will get wackier over time, I hope that I can give her permission to imagine all she wants, while distinguishing between truth and fiction.
Do you have a child who makes up stories? How do you react?