Friday, January 18, 2008

Monsters, Inc.

I wondered if it was possible to raise a child to not know what monsters were. Could someone grow up without believing there was something under the bed or hidden in the closet? Well, the other day I noticed that it took very little effort to convince Simon he was being chased. And I have to admit that, despite my plan to refrain from playing the boogie man, it was impossible to keep myself from growling and shambling after him.

Young predators often use play to practice their hunting skills. Those adorable lion cubs may look so precious as they roll around on the ground, but that just leads to harder stuff, like chasing down gazelles and mauling hikers. Humans, unfortunately, don't fall into the "predator" category. Before we mastered things like clubs, spears, and automatic weapons we were pretty much useless in a fight, so we have millions of years of evolution telling us to get the heck out of the way of anything with teeth as large as our forearms. It's only natural that our young instinctively run from us as we growl and chase after them.

As an intellectual exercise, imagine if lions evolved to the point where they established a movie industry. There would be no horror films. Even though there are bigger animals around, lions have been the meanest things in their neck of the woods for a long time, so they'd have no concept of monsters. There would be no Godzilla, or alien invaders, or an evil clown terrorizing a small Maine town. And their kids wouldn't be afraid of the dark. Tell one of them that there's something under their bed and they'd be crawling under there in a shot with a meat tenderizer.

So I guess I'll let Simon learn about monsters, but I'll also teach him how to exploit their weaknesses. The ones under the bed, for instance, are powerless against blankets. A flashlight beam will scare off the ones in the closet, and I'm already working on rules for playing Zombie Attack. No tool-using son of mine is going to be monster chow.

No comments: